Echo

[Doug Gwyn]

In article <6557 at june.cs.washington.edu> ka at june.cs.washington.edu (Kenneth Almquist) writes:
>Any suggestions?  In particular I would like to know if any standards
>organizations have addressed the semantics of echo.  Does anyone know
>what the merged AT&T/SUN UNIX is going to do about echo?

I don't know what SVR4.0 plans to do about it, but I know what I recommended
some time ago in this newsgroup, as implemented in our System V emulation on
4BSD systems:

	echo -e stuff	# interprets \-escapes in "stuff"
	echo -n stuff	# omits the trailing newline
	echo stuff	# your choice of System V or 7th Edition behavior

The idea is to transition to an eventual version of "echo" that follows
the 9th Edition rules.  But first we have to get everybody's version to
handle the -e option so all those System V shell scripts can be edited
to use it instead of assuming that \ interpretation is on by default.

Once everyone has had a chance to use -e when they want \ interpretation,
then "echo" can be changed so that

	echo stuff	# 7th Edition behavior

I am REALLY pissed off at whoever it was in AT&T that decided to change
the existing behavior of a utility as important as "echo"!  They should
have introduced the -e option in the first place.