Comment 4 for bug 116226

this is behaviour changed upstream:

"Changed from 3.1 to 3.2, for Posix
conformance. `echo -e' (and the corresponding xpg_echo shell option)
now conform to the POSIX standard and accept 0-3 octal digits after a
(required) leading `\0'.

The xpg_echo and `echo -e' code should be identical. There are lots of
ways to indicate that backslash escapes should be interpreted -- maybe
too many -- but when they are, they should behave consistently.

This is why portable applications should use printf. "