Re: [PATCH] test-lib.sh: use printf instead of echo

Junio C Hamano wrote:

Yes, Hannes caught the same, too.  Sorry for the sloppiness.

We currently use "echo" all over the place (e.g., 'echo "$path"' in git-sh-setup), and every time we fix it there is a chance of making mistakes. I wonder if it would make sense to add a helper to make the echo calls easier to replace:

-- >8 --
Subject: git-sh-setup: introduce sane_echo helper

Using 'echo' with arguments that might contain backslashes or "-e" or "-n" can produce confusing results that vary from platform to platform (e.g., dash always interprets \ escape sequences and echoes "-e" verbatim, whereas bash does not interpret \ escapes unless "-e" is passed as an argument to echo and suppresses the "-e" from its output).

Instead, we should use printf, which is more predictable:

	printf '%s\n' "$foo"; # Just prints $foo, on all platforms.

Blindly replacing echo with "printf '%s\n'" would not be good enough because that printf prints each argument on its own line. Provide a sane_echo helper that prints its arguments, space-delimited, on a single line, to make this easier to remember, and tweak 'say' and 'die_with_status' to illustrate how it is used.

No functional change intended.

Signed-off-by: Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>
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 git-sh-setup.sh | 8 ++++++--
 1 file changed, 6 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-)