Date:        Mon, 10 Jun 2002 11:56:03 -0500
    From:        Eric Gillespie <epg@pretzelnet.org>
    Message-ID:  <20020610165603.7026FA2C8@romulus.pretzelnet.org>

  | And as a matter of fact they have.  I'm surprised no one has brought
  | up the new unified POSIX/SUSv3, which forbids all options to echo(1):

Leaving aside the stuff about interpreting \ nonsense which appears
to remain in those drafts (options aren't an issue, one can always have
 -- to end the options unambiguously, though it wouldn't be backward
compat, but \ escapes in echo are simply horrid).


But when I said "nothing added" I meant specifically not ...

  | | The echo utility writes its arguments to standard output, followed
  | | by a <newline>.

That is, the <newline> shouldn't be there either (if -n were to be deleted).
If one wants a newline appended then

nl='
'
echo string"$nl"

is pretty easy to manage.    Of course, there's simply too much history
with echo now to ever truly make it rational.

kre