From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.9) Gecko/20050711 Firefox/1.0.5 Description of problem: $ ksh $ echo "-e foo\c" -e foo\c $ type echo echo is a shell builtin ksh man page sez: echo [ arg ... ] When the first arg does not begin with a -, and none of the argu- ments contain a \, then echo prints each of its argumentsseparated by a space and terminated by a new-line. Otherwise, the behavior of echo is system dependent and print or printf describedbelow should be used. See echo(1) for usage and description. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): ksh-20050202-1 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. see Description above 2. 3. Additional info:
Well, the first arg begins with a '-', therefore the behaviour of echo IS system dependent. You'd better use either /bin/echo or the builtins print/printf.