View file File name : printf Content :printf [ -v name ] format [ arg ... ] Print the arguments according to the format specification. For- matting rules are the same as used in C. The same escape se- quences as for echo are recognised in the format. All C conver- sion specifications ending in one of csdiouxXeEfgGn are handled. In addition to this, `%b' can be used instead of `%s' to cause escape sequences in the argument to be recognised and `%q' can be used to quote the argument in such a way that allows it to be reused as shell input. With the numeric format specifiers, if the corresponding argument starts with a quote character, the numeric value of the following character is used as the number to print; otherwise the argument is evaluated as an arithmetic expression. See the section `Arithmetic Evaluation' in zsh- misc(1) for a description of arithmetic expressions. With `%n', the corresponding argument is taken as an identifier which is created as an integer parameter. Normally, conversion specifications are applied to each argument in order but they can explicitly specify the nth argument is to be used by replacing `%' by `%n$' and `*' by `*n$'. It is rec- ommended that you do not mix references of this explicit style with the normal style and the handling of such mixed styles may be subject to future change. If arguments remain unused after formatting, the format string is reused until all arguments have been consumed. With the print builtin, this can be suppressed by using the -r option. If more arguments are required by the format than have been specified, the behaviour is as if zero or an empty string had been speci- fied as the argument. The -v option causes the output to be stored as the value of the parameter name, instead of printed. If name is an array and the format string is reused when consuming arguments then one array element will be used for each use of the format string.