Chet Ramey wrote:
> Giles Orr wrote:
> > Not sure if this a bug or a documentation problem: it's certainly a
> > change from previous behaviour, and a disagreement between current
> > behaviour and the documentation.
> >
> > The man page says that:
> > $ echo -e "\173"
> > should produce a "{" but instead it produces a "\173". ...
>
> I'm not sure which man page you're looking at, but the one shipped with
> bash-3.2.48 includes the following in the description of "echo":
>
> \0nnn the eight-bit character whose value is the octal value
> nnn (zero to three octal digits)
>
> I think that makes it pretty clear that the leading 0 is not optional.
The man page shipped with Debian Stable Lenny for 3.2.39 says:
\nnn the eight-bit character whose value is the octal value
nnn (one to three digits)
However on that same system this is the behavior:
$ echo -e "\173"
\173
$ echo -e "\0173"
{
I think this was simply a documentation bug that has subsequently been
addressed.
Bob
