Re: [PATCH] CodingGuidelines: use octal escapes, not hex
From: Eric Sunshine <hidden>
Date: 2023-06-13 18:16:35
Possibly related (same subject, not in this thread)
- 2023-06-13 · Re: [PATCH] CodingGuidelines: use octal escapes, not hex · Junio C Hamano <hidden>
On Tue, Jun 13, 2023 at 1:44 PM Jonathan Tan [off-list ref] wrote:
quoted hunk ↗ jump to hunk
Hexadecimal escapes in shell scripts are not portable across shells (in particular, "dash" does not support them). Write in the CodingGuidelines document that we should be using octal escapes instead. Signed-off-by: Jonathan Tan <redacted> ---diff --git a/Documentation/CodingGuidelines b/Documentation/CodingGuidelines@@ -188,6 +188,9 @@ For shell scripts specifically (not exhaustive): + - Use octal escape sequences (e.g. "\302\242"), not hexadecimal (e.g. + "\xc2\xa2"), as the latter is not portable.
The shell itself doesn't interpret these sequences, so this description feels too generic. Perhaps it would make more sense to cite specific tools for which octal sequences are needed for portability reasons, such as `printf`, `sed`, `tr`, etc.