serenity/Base/usr/share/man/man1/printf.md

Name

printf - format and print data

Synopsis

$ printf <format> [arguments...]

Description

printf formats argument(s) according to format and prints the result to standard output.

format is similar to the C printf format string, with the following differences:

• The format specifier b (%b) is not supported.
• The format specifiers that require a writable pointer (e.g. n) are not supported.
• The format specifier q (%q) has a different behavior, where it shall print a given string as a quoted string, which is safe to use in shell inputs.
• Common escape sequences are interpreted, namely the following:

escape	description
\\\\	literal backslash
\\"	literal double quote
\\a	alert (BEL)
\\b	backspace
\\c	Ends the format string
\\e	escape (\\x1b)
\\f	form feed
\\n	newline
\\r	carriage return
\\t	tab
\\v	vertical tab

The format string is reapplied until all arguments are consumed, and a missing argument is treated as zero for numeric format specifiers, and an empty string for string format specifiers.

Examples

# print 64 as a hexadecimal number, with the starting '0x'
$ printf '%#x' 64

# prints "a0\n", ignoring everything after '\c'
$ printf '%s%d\n\caaaa' a

# prints "123400", as 'x' is an invalid number, and the missing argument for the last '%d' is treated as zero.
$ printf '%d%d%d' 1 2 3 4 x

See also

• echo(1)