Echo

[Richard A. O'Keefe]

In article <1988Dec1.214552.18211 at utzoo.uucp> henry at utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) writes:
[about "echo"]
>Having the escapes available actually turns out to be surprisingly handy,
>or at least that's been our experience.

>Actually you can't echo an *arbitrary* string with any of the current
>echos, since strings like "-n" tend to have surprising effects even in
>otherwise-innocuous versions, but that's a lesser problem.

These are some of the reasons why I wrote "lit" and posted it to the net.
	lit [-n] [-d{clist}] [-e{char}] arg ...
(The -dxyz stuff lets you specify something other than blanks between
the arguments, e.g. "lit -d: foo baz ugh" => "foo:baz:ugh".)  And of
course it supports "--" as end-of-options, so "lit -- -n" works.

Not the least of the reasons for the -e option is that when you are
going through several layers of string interpretation (e.g. the shell
script is written by a C program) it is just too painful when all of
the layers use the same escape character.