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PROLOG
This manual page is part of the POSIX Programmer's Manual. The Linux implementation of this interface
may differ (consult the corresponding Linux manual page for details of Linux behavior), or the interface
may not be implemented on Linux.
NAME
printf — write formatted output
SYNOPSIS
printf format [argument...]
DESCRIPTION
The printf utility shall write formatted operands to the standard output. The argument operands shall be
formatted under control of the format operand.
OPTIONS
None.
OPERANDS
The following operands shall be supported:
format A string describing the format to use to write the remaining operands. See the EXTENDED
DESCRIPTION section.
argument The strings to be written to standard output, under the control of format. See the EXTENDED
DESCRIPTION section.
STDIN
Not used.
INPUT FILES
None.
ENVIRONMENT VARIABLES
The following environment variables shall affect the execution of printf:
LANG Provide a default value for the internationalization variables that are unset or null. (See the
Base Definitions volume of POSIX.1‐2017, Section 8.2, Internationalization Variables the
precedence of internationalization variables used to determine the values of locale
categories.)
LC_ALL If set to a non-empty string value, override the values of all the other internationalization
variables.
LC_CTYPE Determine the locale for the interpretation of sequences of bytes of text data as characters
(for example, single-byte as opposed to multi-byte characters in arguments).
LC_MESSAGES
Determine the locale that should be used to affect the format and contents of diagnostic
messages written to standard error.
LC_NUMERIC
Determine the locale for numeric formatting. It shall affect the format of numbers written
using the e, E, f, g, and G conversion specifier characters (if supported).
NLSPATH Determine the location of message catalogs for the processing of LC_MESSAGES.
ASYNCHRONOUS EVENTS
Default.
STDOUT
See the EXTENDED DESCRIPTION section.
STDERR
The standard error shall be used only for diagnostic messages.
OUTPUT FILES
None.
EXTENDED DESCRIPTION
The format operand shall be used as the format string described in the Base Definitions volume of
POSIX.1‐2017, Chapter 5, File Format Notation with the following exceptions:
1. A <space> in the format string, in any context other than a flag of a conversion specification, shall
be treated as an ordinary character that is copied to the output.
2. A '' character in the format string shall be treated as a '' character, not as a <space>.
3. In addition to the escape sequences shown in the Base Definitions volume of POSIX.1‐2017, Chapter 5,
File Format Notation ('\\', '\a', '\b', '\f', '\n', '\r', '\t', '\v'), "\ddd", where ddd is a one,
two, or three-digit octal number, shall be written as a byte with the numeric value specified by the
octal number.
4. The implementation shall not precede or follow output from the d or u conversion specifiers with
<blank> characters not specified by the format operand.
5. The implementation shall not precede output from the o conversion specifier with zeros not specified
by the format operand.
6. The a, A, e, E, f, F, g, and G conversion specifiers need not be supported.
7. An additional conversion specifier character, b, shall be supported as follows. The argument shall be
taken to be a string that can contain <backslash>-escape sequences. The following <backslash>-escape
sequences shall be supported:
-- The escape sequences listed in the Base Definitions volume of POSIX.1‐2017, Chapter 5, File
Format Notation ('\\', '\a', '\b', '\f', '\n', '\r', '\t', '\v'), which shall be converted to the
characters they represent
-- "\0ddd", where ddd is a zero, one, two, or three-digit octal number that shall be converted to a
byte with the numeric value specified by the octal number
-- '\c', which shall not be written and shall cause printf to ignore any remaining characters in the
string operand containing it, any remaining string operands, and any additional characters in the
format operand
The interpretation of a <backslash> followed by any other sequence of characters is unspecified.
Bytes from the converted string shall be written until the end of the string or the number of bytes
indicated by the precision specification is reached. If the precision is omitted, it shall be taken
to be infinite, so all bytes up to the end of the converted string shall be written.
8. For each conversion specification that consumes an argument, the next argument operand shall be
evaluated and converted to the appropriate type for the conversion as specified below.
9. The format operand shall be reused as often as necessary to satisfy the argument operands. Any extra
b, c, or s conversion specifiers shall be evaluated as if a null string argument were supplied; other
extra conversion specifications shall be evaluated as if a zero argument were supplied. If the format
operand contains no conversion specifications and argument operands are present, the results are
unspecified.
10. If a character sequence in the format operand begins with a '%' character, but does not form a valid
conversion specification, the behavior is unspecified.
11. The argument to the c conversion specifier can be a string containing zero or more bytes. If it
contains one or more bytes, the first byte shall be written and any additional bytes shall be
ignored. If the argument is an empty string, it is unspecified whether nothing is written or a null
byte is written.
The argument operands shall be treated as strings if the corresponding conversion specifier is b, c, or
s, and shall be evaluated as if by the strtod() function if the corresponding conversion specifier is a,
A, e, E, f, F, g, or G. Otherwise, they shall be evaluated as unsuffixed C integer constants, as
described by the ISO C standard, with the following extensions:
* A leading <plus-sign> or <hyphen-minus> shall be allowed.
* If the leading character is a single-quote or double-quote, the value shall be the numeric value in
the underlying codeset of the character following the single-quote or double-quote.
* Suffixed integer constants may be allowed.
If an argument operand cannot be completely converted into an internal value appropriate to the
corresponding conversion specification, a diagnostic message shall be written to standard error and the
utility shall not exit with a zero exit status, but shall continue processing any remaining operands and
shall write the value accumulated at the time the error was detected to standard output.
It shall not be considered an error if an argument operand is not completely used for a b, c, or s
conversion.
EXIT STATUS
The following exit values shall be returned:
0 Successful completion.
>0 An error occurred.
CONSEQUENCES OF ERRORS
Default.
The following sections are informative.
APPLICATION USAGE
The floating-point formatting conversion specifications of printf() are not required because all
arithmetic in the shell is integer arithmetic. The awk utility performs floating-point calculations and
provides its own printf function. The bc utility can perform arbitrary-precision floating-point
arithmetic, but does not provide extensive formatting capabilities. (This printf utility cannot really be
used to format bc output; it does not support arbitrary precision.) Implementations are encouraged to
support the floating-point conversions as an extension.
Note that this printf utility, like the printf() function defined in the System Interfaces volume of
POSIX.1‐2017 on which it is based, makes no special provision for dealing with multi-byte characters when
using the %c conversion specification or when a precision is specified in a %b or %s conversion
specification. Applications should be extremely cautious using either of these features when there are
multi-byte characters in the character set.
No provision is made in this volume of POSIX.1‐2017 which allows field widths and precisions to be
specified as '*' since the '*' can be replaced directly in the format operand using shell variable
substitution. Implementations can also provide this feature as an extension if they so choose.
Hexadecimal character constants as defined in the ISO C standard are not recognized in the format operand
because there is no consistent way to detect the end of the constant. Octal character constants are
limited to, at most, three octal digits, but hexadecimal character constants are only terminated by a
non-hex-digit character. In the ISO C standard, the "##" concatenation operator can be used to terminate
a constant and follow it with a hexadecimal character to be written. In the shell, concatenation occurs
before the printf utility has a chance to parse the end of the hexadecimal constant.
The %b conversion specification is not part of the ISO C standard; it has been added here as a portable
way to process <backslash>-escapes expanded in string operands as provided by the echo utility. See also
the APPLICATION USAGE section of echo for ways to use printf as a replacement for all of the traditional
versions of the echo utility.
If an argument cannot be parsed correctly for the corresponding conversion specification, the printf
utility is required to report an error. Thus, overflow and extraneous characters at the end of an
argument being used for a numeric conversion shall be reported as errors.
EXAMPLES
To alert the user and then print and read a series of prompts:
printf "\aPlease fill in the following: \nName: "
read name
printf "Phone number: "
read phone
To read out a list of right and wrong answers from a file, calculate the percentage correctly, and print
them out. The numbers are right-justified and separated by a single <tab>. The percentage is written to
one decimal place of accuracy:
while read right wrong ; do
percent=$(echo "scale=1;($right*100)/($right+$wrong)" | bc)
printf "%2d right\t%2d wrong\t(%s%%)\n" \
$right $wrong $percent
done < database_file
The command:
printf "%5d%4d\n" 1 21 321 4321 54321
produces:
1 21
3214321
54321 0
Note that the format operand is used three times to print all of the given strings and that a '0' was
supplied by printf to satisfy the last %4d conversion specification.
The printf utility is required to notify the user when conversion errors are detected while producing
numeric output; thus, the following results would be expected on an implementation with 32-bit twos-
complement integers when %d is specified as the format operand:
┌────────────┬─────────────┬───────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ │ Standard │ │
│ Argument │ Output │ Diagnostic Output │
├────────────┼─────────────┼───────────────────────────────────────────┤
│5a │ 5 │ printf: "5a" not completely converted │
│9999999999 │ 2147483647 │ printf: "9999999999" arithmetic overflow │
│-9999999999 │ -2147483648 │ printf: "-9999999999" arithmetic overflow │
│ABC │ 0 │ printf: "ABC" expected numeric value │
└────────────┴─────────────┴───────────────────────────────────────────┘
The diagnostic message format is not specified, but these examples convey the type of information that
should be reported. Note that the value shown on standard output is what would be expected as the return
value from the strtol() function as defined in the System Interfaces volume of POSIX.1‐2017. A similar
correspondence exists between %u and strtoul() and %e, %f, and %g (if the implementation supports
floating-point conversions) and strtod().
In a locale using the ISO/IEC 646:1991 standard as the underlying codeset, the command:
printf "%d\n" 3 +3 -3 \'3 \"+3 "'-3"
produces:
3 Numeric value of constant 3
3 Numeric value of constant 3
-3 Numeric value of constant -3
51 Numeric value of the character '3' in the ISO/IEC 646:1991 standard codeset
43 Numeric value of the character '+' in the ISO/IEC 646:1991 standard codeset
45 Numeric value of the character '-' in the ISO/IEC 646:1991 standard codeset
Note that in a locale with multi-byte characters, the value of a character is intended to be the value of
the equivalent of the wchar_t representation of the character as described in the System Interfaces
volume of POSIX.1‐2017.
RATIONALE
The printf utility was added to provide functionality that has historically been provided by echo.
However, due to irreconcilable differences in the various versions of echo extant, the version has few
special features, leaving those to this new printf utility, which is based on one in the Ninth Edition
system.
The EXTENDED DESCRIPTION section almost exactly matches the printf() function in the ISO C standard,
although it is described in terms of the file format notation in the Base Definitions volume of
POSIX.1‐2017, Chapter 5, File Format Notation.
Earlier versions of this standard specified that arguments for all conversions other than b, c, and s
were evaluated in the same way (as C constants, but with stated exceptions). For implementations
supporting the floating-point conversions it was not clear whether integer conversions need only accept
integer constants and floating-point conversions need only accept floating-point constants, or whether
both types of conversions should accept both types of constants. Also by not distinguishing between them,
the requirement relating to a leading single-quote or double-quote applied to floating-point conversions
even though this provided no useful functionality to applications that was not already available through
the integer conversions. The current standard clarifies the situation by specifying that the arguments
for floating-point conversions are evaluated as if by strtod(), and the arguments for integer conversions
are evaluated as C integer constants, with the special treatment of leading single-quote and double-quote
applying only to integer conversions.
FUTURE DIRECTIONS
None.
SEE ALSO
awk, bc, echo
The Base Definitions volume of POSIX.1‐2017, Chapter 5, File Format Notation, Chapter 8, Environment
Variables
The System Interfaces volume of POSIX.1‐2017, fprintf(), strtod()
COPYRIGHT
Portions of this text are reprinted and reproduced in electronic form from IEEE Std 1003.1-2017, Standard
for Information Technology -- Portable Operating System Interface (POSIX), The Open Group Base
Specifications Issue 7, 2018 Edition, Copyright (C) 2018 by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics
Engineers, Inc and The Open Group. In the event of any discrepancy between this version and the original
IEEE and The Open Group Standard, the original IEEE and The Open Group Standard is the referee document.
The original Standard can be obtained online at http://www.opengroup.org/unix/online.html .
Any typographical or formatting errors that appear in this page are most likely to have been introduced
during the conversion of the source files to man page format. To report such errors, see
https://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/reporting_bugs.html .