Re: What is the opposite of 'printf'?

[Paul Eggert]

Matthew Woehlke <address@hidden> writes:

> Given the remainder of this thread, can one of the maintainers offer
> an opinion on whether or not 'unprintf' (also useful for programmers;
> again, see rest of the thread) would be a useful addition to
> coreutils, or perhaps some other existing GNU project?

I dunno, it sounds fairly specialized.  Why not just use a portable
POSIX script instead?  It should be small.  Something like this:

  od -v -t o1 |
  awk '{
    printf "printf %%b '\''";
    for (i = 2; i <= NF; i++) {
      printf "\\0%d", $i
    }
    printf "'\''\n"
  }'