Hi Ingo, > > > > The time-honoured way to get modern-day `printf foo' is > > > > > > > > echo foo | tr -d \\012 > > Why would you want to return to echo(1)?
Because I was giving the `time-honoured way' and I thought I saw a recent mention on this that if something still works on older systems then it's nice not to needlessly break it. > > | tr -d \\\\\\\\012 \ ... > Back then, the escaping record in one of the Perl scripts used to > prepare submissions to TeXing was - eight successive backslashes. It tends to be a power of two. I once needed six, which I thought was nice. Sometimes, no number of backslashes works. https://github.com/onetrueawk/awk/blob/master/FIXES#L638 > . pso sh -c \ > "printf '%s' '.ds *f ' ; \ > ls \\*[fontpath]/dev\*[.T] \ > - | tr '[:cntrl:]' '[ *32]'" > + | tr '\\\\n' ' '" > . \" This dummy line is necessary; the preceding line eats it. I've avoided trying to understand the aim until now. Given zero or more files in a directory, the string `*f' should be set to their names? sed makes this easy. $ for n in {0..3}; do > (echo '.ds *f'; seq $n) | > sed '$!s/$/ \\/' > done .ds *f .ds *f \ 1 .ds *f \ 1 \ 2 .ds *f \ 1 \ 2 \ 3 $ As a `.pso': $ cat ingo.tr .pl 1 .nf .ds fontpath /usr/share/groff/1.22.3/font .pso (echo '.ds *f'; ls \*[fontpath]/dev\*[.T]) | sed '$!s/$/ \\\\/' .tm *f=`\*(*f' $ $ nroff -U ingo.tr *f=`B BI DESC I R' $ Using `[:cntrl:]' to try and wipe out a `\n' in the name of portability to systems with unknown behaviour is misleading. As the reader, I thought the aim was to wipe out any and all control characters. Puzzled, that's when I took the time to try and understand the aim. :-) -- Cheers, Ralph. https://plus.google.com/+RalphCorderoy
