Re: echo "enhancement" leads to confused legacy script tools...

[Ralf Wildenhues]

Hello everybody,

* Linda W wrote on Mon, Mar 20, 2006 at 10:16:44PM CET:
> Henrik Nordstrom wrote:
> >Note: As far as I can tell the echo tests in the configure script
> >generated by autoconf-2.59 tests for quite many things but not \digit as
> >far as I can tell. I have not yet looked into the CVS version.

Confirmed with
- bash-3.0 configured as
    configure --enable_xpg_default
- squid CVS (as described by Paul), configured as
   CONFIG_SHELL=xpgbash; export CONFIG_SHELL
   $CONFIG_SHELL ../squid/configure -C --enable_xpg_default \
        CONFIG_SHELL=$CONFIG_SHELL
- both the autotools versions used in the CVS version, as well as CVS
  Autoconf.

The issue is not in Autoconf, but in the macro AC_CREATE_PREFIX_CONFIG_H
(taken from the autoconf archive?).  Inside the squid source tree, the
macro resides in lib/cppunit-1.10.0/config/ac_create_prefix_config_h.m4
as part of the cppunit subpackage.

The macro is now deemed obsolete at
http://autoconf-archive.cryp.to/macros-by-category.html
the successor is AX_PREFIX_CONFIG_H.  Which itself uses printf to work
around these issues.  It has other issues with recent Autoconf, though,
so it needs changed as well.  I will look into that, and post an update.


FWIW, are there _any_ other shells that do not output \1 with
  echo "\\1"

except for bash-3.0-with-xpg-echo?

Cheers,
Ralf