On Sun, Aug 15, 2010 at 02:02:05PM +0400, Dmitry Groshev wrote: > You are wrong. Try "echo $'\x{123456}AB'" and look at the result. > Or read the source code: lib/sh/strtans.c
The manual (bash 4.1) says: \xHH the eight-bit character whose value is the hexadecimal value HH (one or two hex digits) My bash (also 4.1) says: imadev:~$ echo $'\x{123456}AB' VAB So, it looks like the undocumented feature that you asked us to test for you is only respecting the last two hex digits inside the curly braces. Since none of this behavior is documented, I wouldn't count on bash retaining that behavior in the future.