Where to find printf formatting reference?
As the man page references the C format specifications, you may want to explore it to get the details. E.g. here: http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/functions/printf.html
If you insist on having the offline reference, you might want to install the corresponding man pages pack for C lib, so that you could see man 3 printf
. This man page is a part of man-pages-2.39-15.el5 package on an old RHEL nearest to me.
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l0b0
Author, The newline Guide to Bash Scripting (https://www.newline.co/courses/newline-guide-to-bash-scripting). Hobby (https://gitlab.com/victor-engmark) & work software developer.
Updated on September 18, 2022Comments
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l0b0 over 1 year
Where is the offline reference of the format specifiers (e.g.,
%i
,%s
) which are supported by the Bash/systemprintf
command? I've looked inhelp printf
,man 1 printf
andman 3 printf
without luck.man 1 printf
mentions says it supports%% a single %
%b ARGUMENT as a string with `\' escapes interpreted, except that octal escapes are of the form \0 or \0NNN
and all C format specifications ending with one of diouxXfeEgGcs, with ARGUMENTs converted to proper type first. Variable widths are handled.
The character list is useful, but doesn't explain the exact semantics of each format specification.
-
YoloTats.com over 11 yearsThe
printf
entry inman bash
refers toman 1 printf
and contains additional format specifiers like%b
,%q
etc.
-
-
l0b0 over 11 yearsI missed it in
man 3 printf
before - Format specifiers are called "conversion specifiers" there, and are not listed with the percent sign in front. -
Richard Fortune over 11 yearsJust to make it explicit: the shell
printf
command supports only a subset of the specifiers detailed inman 3 printf
.