Re: Espace characters need -e, wrong behaviour

[mwoehlke]

Nico Schottelius wrote:
>         Bash needs -e to react on escape characters.
>    No other shell (afaik) does that (confirmed with dash, ksh and zsh),
>    nor does posix specify that behaviour:
>    http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/utilities/echo.html
>                                                                     
>    Another big problem is that people tend to use -e, which will be
> printed
>    by other shells and brakes the output.
>
> Repeat-By:
>    echo '\a'
>
> Fix:
>    Please remove the need for -e and ignore -e for a some time, until
>    it vanished from user programs.

'echo' is known to be non-portable. If you are looking for portability, 
you should be using 'printf'.

Interestingly, this does seem to be inconsistent with many 'sh' 
implementations (I tried on a few old and exotic OS's), although it 
conforms to GNU 'echo' (the command, not the built-in).

--
Matthew
If you can't use a real OS, at least use Cygwin to fake one!