Re: [PATCH/RFC] git-am: Make it easier to see which patch failed

Johannes Schindelin wrote:

On Sun, 18 Jan 2009, Jeff King wrote:

quoted

On Sun, Jan 18, 2009 at 10:41:13AM +0100, Stephan Beyer wrote:

quoted

Hmm, IIRC if $FIRSTLINE contains \n or something like that, it will
interpret this as newline in some shell/echo implementations.

So printf "...%s..." "$FOO" is always sane for user input.

But you are wrong.  And Stephan is wrong, too.

The name "FIRSTLINE" suggests that it is indeed a first line, and 
consequently cannot contain a newline.

I think the point was that $FIRSTLINE can contain a backslash sequence
such as (literally) \n or \r.  Indeed 'man 1p echo' on my system says

  _string_  A string to be written to standard output. If the first
            operand is -n, or if any of the operands contain a
            backslash ( '\' ) character, the results are
            implementation- defined.

(Those POSIX manpages are really useful!)

-- 
Thomas Rast
trast@{inf,student}.ethz.ch