> All commercial systems which come with ksh normally use System V
> semantics...

Yes - is netbsd actually broken here?
the default shell doesn't do \0nnn expansion.
Anyone know off hand what the single Unix spec requires?

Running 'printf' isn't (always) an option, the cost of the fork/exec
if too much for many shell scripts (echo is always a builtin - even
though its behavour depends on $PATH).

    David