> -----Original Message----- > From: Randall R Schulz [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] > Sent: Wednesday, November 22, 2000 5:06 PM > To: Mike Little; [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Subject: RE: Newbie: read works incorrectly > > Mike, > > In the BASH "help" output for "printf" there is nothing that states > that if there are more arguments than there are formatting directives > in the format control string that the control string will be reused > as necessary to consume all the arguments. However, in the "man" page > for BASH it states exactly that. Perhaps that's a bash bug that needs reporting to the maintainer of bash. I'm not sure whether the built-in help is meant to be comprehensive. > > I like you signature. Thanks, I stole it from someone else ;-) But it kinda summarizes my philosophy on life. > I never knew of the "printf" built-in before > this topic thread showed up! Perhaps that's because it post-dates the > printed BASH manual I usually rely on. Do you or does anyone know > with which version of BASH the "printf" built-in first appeared? I only vaguely recall it's existence, I'd never used it. One further example that I think illustrates how it works and which maybe what the original poster intended. echo "one two three four five" | while read line ; do printf '%s\r\n' "$line" done results in one two three four five That is, each line of input to the while loop is printed separately regardless of the number of separate words. Hope this helps, Mike -- Mike Little Share what you know. Learn what you don't. ServicePOWER Business Solutions Ltd home: [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- Want to unsubscribe from this list? Send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
