bash's echo command is broken - YouTube <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lq98MM2ogBk>
To restate what's in the video, you can't safely use echo to print the contents of a variable that could be arbitrary, because the variable could consist entirely of '-n', '-e', or '-E', and '--' is not interpreted as the end of options, but rather, something to print. I recognized this and replaced all of my calls to echo with printf some time ago. If POSIX mandates that '--' not be taken as the end of options, then the safe thing would be to simply not have echo take any options. Obviously, that would break backwards compatibility, so you'd want this to be optional behavior that the shell programmer can enable if desired. I guess, alternatively, there could be a shell option for echo to interpret '--' as the end of options. However, this would require more work on the part of whoever may be trying to resolve this issue in their scripts. Just a thought.
