On Thu, Jun 12, 2025 at 9:44 AM Paul Smith <paul@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On Thu, 2025-06-12 at 01:50 -0400, Eric Sunshine wrote: > > Had it used the simpler: > > > > echo "$foo" > > > > this sort of problem (forgetting the "\n") would never have occurred. > > Just be aware that echo is not well-standardized: many versions of echo > accept extra options or treat certain chars specially. So, printf > (which IS well-standardized) is always safer unless you are 100% sure > that the text on the echo command line is simple: cannot start with a > "-", doesn't contain special chars like backslash, etc. > > For portability I (personally) always prefer printf unless I know > exactly what the text contains (like showing a static string). Yup, you're right. I always do the same when I can't trust the argument to be `echo`-safe, but apparently I wasn't thinking of that case when I wrote the email. Thanks for the dose of sanity.
