Re: Bug in gnulib-tools prevents bison from bootstrapping

[Bruno Haible]

Paul Eggert wrote:
> I think printf is portable nowadays, at least to the platforms that
> gnulib-tool is likely to run on.

Indeed, 'printf' is useful to use when we find that it is a shell built-in,
namely on bash >= 2.0. (See the patch in the other mail.) But other than that?

'printf' is portably available as a program. But if it's not a shell built-in,
there is no point in using it since 'cat' is also available as a program, and
is less likely to suffer size limitations.

In particular, on AIX, HP-UX, IRIX, OSF/1, there is no other shell than the
vendor's /bin/sh and /bin/ksh that one can use as a workaround, and these
shells don't have 'printf' built-in.

> One advantage of using printf is that it won't mishandle a string that
> happens to equal "-n".

This is a slight advantage over the BSD 'echo' command, but not over
the echo emulated with 'cat'.

> The substitute purposely does not treat "-n" specially; "-n" is just
> another string, which is The Right Thing, usually.

I agree. The overwhelming use of 'echo' is to output some string verbatim.
Now that - as you say - 'printf' is universally available, the few cases
where escape interpretation is desired or where end-of-line should be omitted
can be done with 'printf'. It would be good if POSIX would standardize on
such a simplified 'echo'.

Bruno