[OS X TeX] Remarks about TeX on Leopard
Martin Costabel
costabel at wanadoo.fr
Sun Nov 4 15:49:03 CET 2007
Peter Dyballa wrote:
[]
> This is not needed in my opinion. And it's a bad substitution: echo is
> built-in to bash and other shells (man builtin) while printf is an
> external programme.
>
> The use of 'echo -n' in these three places in simpdftex is simply
> unnecessary, if not faulty:
>
> 126: argwithoutlead=`echo -n "$1"|sed 's/^--//'`
> 434: nosuffixbasename=`echo -n ${basename}|sed 's/\.[^.]*$//'`
> 435: nodvisuffixbasename=`echo -n ${basename}|sed
> 's/\.[dD][vV][iI]$//'`
>
> The first argument of the script (simpdftex) cannot contain a new-line
> character, and neither can the base name of the file to process. So a
> simple echo is just enough.
You are wrong and right at the same time :-)
The "-n" flag is not about newlines in the echoed string, but about
*adding* a newline at the end. The simple echo adds a newline.
OTOH, the assignment to a variable removes that newline again, so that
in the current situation there is actually no difference between "echo"
and "echo -n", except that the latter breaks because of Apple's
ill-conceived POSIX-compliance.
--
Martin
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