I am porting my shell script (quite big shell script) from bash to android shell (mksh shell).
In Android, printf
does not seem to be working the same way as it works in other Linux systems.
Sample code :
$ cat sample.sh
...
func1()
{
A=100
HEXA=`printf "%04x" ${A}`
echo "A - ${A} HEXA - ${HEXA}"
}
func1
This function's output is as follows.
$ ./sample.sh
A - 100 HEXA - 300000078
It is printing a really weird number.
I saw from other posts and from the manpage of mksh
that printf
is not recommended to be used in mksh
. My shell script, which is quite big, is using it very heavily. So, I want to handle this somehow. What are my options to handle this?
Fixing printf
in toybox
is great.
But in case anyone would like to print out a number converted to hex (or pretty much any other reasonable base from 2
to 36
if they would be so inclined) on an unrooted device with the old toybox
(or no toybox
at all) - here is a way how to do it using typeset
built-in of mksh
:
baseconv(){ typeset -Ui${3:-16} -Z35 x=$1; echo ${x: -${2:-8}};}
func1()
{
A=100
HEXA=$(baseconv $A 4 16)
echo "A - ${A} HEXA - ${HEXA}"
}
or just make a specific function for the printf "%04x"
case:
printf04x(){ typeset -Ui16 -Z7 x=$1; echo ${x: -4};}
func1()
{
A=100
echo "A - ${A} HEXA - $(printf04x $A)"
}
printf in Android is linking to toybox
root:/ # which printf
/system/bin/printf
root:/ # ls -l /system/bin/printf
lrwxr-xr-x root shell 2016-11-14 21:02 printf -> toybox
So the issue turned out to be in toybox printf.
The issue is now fixed - https://github.com/landley/toybox/issues/54