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

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On 22/07/2026 15:45, Dmitri Seletski wrote:
> 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'
I added blank lines to group the above into,
string, integer, float, and other groups.

I also pushed the attached to improve the
printf reference tables in the info docs.

cheers,
Padraig
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