On Fri, Jan 02, 2026 at 16:34:59 +0530, Anshuman Khanna wrote:
> On this
> <https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/html_node/ANSI_002dC-Quoting.html>
> page

(which describes the $'...' quoting form)

> of Bash documentation, it is mentioned that to type an ASCII character we
> can write it in its octal notation. However, there is a mistake here.
> 
> The documentation says that the character must be written as `\nnn` where
> "nnn" are octal digits. The actual working requires that we type as `\0nnn`
> where "nnn" are octal digits. Without the `\0` "nnn" isn't recognised as an
> octal representation.

Your claim is incorrect.

hobbit:~$ printf %s $'\1abc' | hd
00000000  01 61 62 63                                       |.abc|
00000004
hobbit:~$ printf %s $'\10abc' | hd
00000000  08 61 62 63                                       |.abc|
00000004

\1 and \10 are both recognized as octal values.  This works in bash 5.2,
5.3 and 2.05b, and though I didn't test any other versions just now,
I'm pretty confident it didn't change in between.

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