bug#81442: Documentation Deficiency: printf man page lacks definition of format specifiers

Fantastic!
Thanks!

On 22/07/2026 13:05, Pádraig Brady wrote:
>> 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