On 18/09/12 19:04, Neil Williams wrote: > On Tue, 18 Sep 2012 11:00:46 +0100 > "James" <james.h...@canonical.com> wrote: > >> Package: wnpp >> Severity: wishlist >> Owner: James Hunt <james.h...@ubuntu.com> >> >> * Package name : out > > Terrible choice of name - utf8-out ? > >> Command-line tool that can produce UTF-8 (Unicode) strings in various ways >> and >> direct them to standard output, standard error or direct to the terminal >> without the need for shell support. Strings can be repeated, delayed, >> randomly-generated, written to arbitrary file descriptors, interspersed with >> other characters and generated using ranges. Printf(1)-style escape >> sequences are supported along with extended escape sequences. >> >> This utility sits somewhere between echo(1) and printf(1) in >> functionality with a dash of seq(1) thrown in. > > If that's true, why hasn't this been included into shells already? Well, zsh and bash do provide similar facilities but out/utf8out/foo/whatever would be able to provide a shell-agnostic facility to produce such output (like echo(1) and printf(1) which some shells have I appreciated added as built-ins).
> > Struggling to see a use-case for it, TBH, which doesn't help with an > alternative name and may indicate that the long description doesn't > really describe why it would be useful. Is this just for test suites? > What needs this utility? > Its striving to be a generic facility to produce output filling the gap between echo and printf as alluded to. Admittedly, I did write this as a test tool, but have attempted to make it as general-purpose as possible. Personally, I can imagine quite a few use cases for this utility in shell scripts. See the examples in the man page for some ideas. Kind regards, James. -- James Hunt ____________________________________ http://upstart.ubuntu.com/cookbook http://upstart.ubuntu.com/cookbook/upstart_cookbook.pdf -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/5058c396.7030...@ubuntu.com
