> That said, I have no objection to Chet adding such a feature to Bash, > if he can think of a sane way to do it. If you have a patch that > implements it, it's possible he'll be willing to review it. I don't really see the point, that'd be just bloating the code base. That task is easy to accomplish using the features that bash already offers:
dualbus@dualbus ~ % cat foo convert() { local base=$1 numerals=$2 number=$3 local result while ((number >= base)); do result=${numerals:number % base:1}$result ((number = number / base)) done result=${numerals:number:1}$result echo "$result" } convert 23 0123456789abcdefghijklm 1040 convert 16 0123456789abcdef 255 convert 6 012345 123 convert 2 .- 10 convert 2 01 5 convert 8 01234567 16 dualbus@dualbus ~ % bash foo 1m5 ff 323 -.-. 101 20 The point of features is to accomplish things that are not already possible, or that are possible, but with an insane amount of work. An 8 line function does what you want, with the features already available.