Eric Gillespie said:

>Well there you go; the standard changes again.  That's why this
>entire discussion is purely academic from my point of view; you
>have to use printf if you're doing anything other than 'echo "foo"'
>or 'echo "foo $bar"'.  echo is completely unreliable.

On the other hand, think about all the systems with a /etc/rc.local
which have lines like this:

if [ -f /usr/local/bb/runbb.sh ]; then
        /usr/local/bb14b/runbb.sh start
        echo -n 'bigbrother'
fi

And there are thousands of opensource packages that use "echo -n" in
the many versions of configure that are out there.

A "man echo" on a Solaris box will show you some confusion.

-- 
Rick Kelly  rmk@rmkhome.com  www.rmkhome.com