Ubuntu
bash package

  1. Bug #1654688
  2. Comment #1

Comment 1 for bug 1654688

Revision history for this message
xhienne (xhienne) wrote :

In my opinion, this is not a bug (and probably not a feature either) but the expected behavior.

bash's printf is a slightly modified version of the underlying printf() function provided by the C standard library. The printf(3) manual explicitly states that the precision is a number of _bytes_, not a number of characters. So this is the expected result with multibyte characters like 'á'.

You might want to switch to a ISO-8859 character set if you want your 'á' character to only take one byte of memory.