bug#81442: Documentation Deficiency: printf man page lacks definition of format specifiers
Pádraig Brady <[email protected]> Wed, 22 Jul 2026 13:05:01 +0100
| Newsgroups | gmane.comp.gnu.core-utils.bugs |
|---|---|
| Message-ID | <[email protected]> |
This is a multi-part message in MIME format. --------------i0soKh0vvLoFVT308iwg95jK Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit > On 20/07/2026 17:10, Pádraig Brady wrote: >> The "see also" has a reference to printf(3), >> which you can drill down to directly depending on you man page viewer, >> or view directly with `man 3 printf`. >> >> But I agree we should show that reference directly in the text. >> >> We need to be careful not to repeat too much info from the (large) printf(3) page, >> but I also agree that we could provide a little more info here. >> >> I'll look at: >> >> Using our recently improved man table formatting to present a conversion summary. >> Including at least mentioning that flags are supported. >> Also an EXAMPLES section would be useful here I think to show supported combinations. I'll apply the attached later, which adds: CONVERSION Shell format example Output %s '[%10s]' 'left pad' [ left pad] %s '[%-10s]' 'right pad' [right pad ] %c %s '%c %.3s' un unibyte u uni %d %i "%'d ;%i04i" 1234 '-1' 1,234 ;-001 %o '%#o' $((2#110100100)) 0644 %u '%u' 0xFFFFFFFF 4294967295 %x '0x%08x' 11259375 0x00abcdef %a %f '%1$a %1$f' 0.0009765625 0x8p-13 0.000977 %e %f '%1$e %1$f' 123.45678 1.234568e+02 123.456789 %g '%1$g %1$.2g' 1.2345678e3 1234.57 1.2e+03 %b '%b' 'food\bbar' foobar %q '%q ' 'a' ';b' $'c\n' a ';b' 'c'$'\n' Marking this as done. cheers, Padraig --------------i0soKh0vvLoFVT308iwg95jK Content-Type: text/x-patch; charset=UTF-8; name="printf-usage.patch" Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="printf-usage.patch" Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64 RnJvbSA4OGY5NWIzYmI0YmRiZWRmYTRiM2JkNmJlYzU2YWQ4MWJiNGUwODIwIE1vbiBTZXAg MTcgMDA6MDA6MDAgMjAwMQpGcm9tOiA9P1VURi04P3E/UD1DMz1BMWRyYWlnPTIwQnJhZHk/ PSA8UEBkcmFpZ0JyYWR5LmNvbT4KRGF0ZTogV2VkLCAyMiBKdWwgMjAyNiAxMjo0OTo1MiAr 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