2017-03-16 Spotted a nice example (i.e. horrible situation) of time perfor- mance optimization. [0] $ printf "Result: %f0 9.949 printf: %f: invalid directive Result: $ LC_ALL=C printf "Result: %f0 9.949 printf: %f: invalid directive Result: $ /usr/bin/printf "Result: %f0 9.949 Result: 9.949000 It is caused by: printf format [arguments ...] Formatted output. Approximately the same as the utility printf, except that it uses the same Backslash expansion and I/O code as the rest of mksh. This is not normally part of mksh; however, distributors may have added this as builtin as a speed hack. When will we eventually learn that these optimization efforts put tripwires out in the landscape, and we'll all get caught in them later. That's like space waste: When the orbit fills with used rocket parts, until it's hard to still find clear windows to fly through. And cleaning up is much to expensive and tedious ... just as with the time optimiziations in code. We are so shortsighted! [0] https://debianforum.de/forum/viewtopic.php?f=34&t=164584&p=1125800#p1125800 http://marmaro.de/lue/ markus schnalke