Comment 3 for bug 225637

I looked up this on the coreutils mailing list (the nearer they have to a BTS, and there is this entry: http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-coreutils/2006-01/msg00070.html about this behaviour:

"Update of patch #3286 (project coreutils):

                  Status: None => Invalid

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Follow-up Comment #1:

POSIX requires the current behavior, where the argument that matches up to %c
is treated as a string and the first character of that string is printed. So,
unfortunately, your patch cannot be accepted without violating POSIX semantics
for printf(1). What would be useful, however, is a documentation patch that
makes this behavior clear in both the info pages and the --help output (right
now, the info pages assume that you already know how printf(3) works, which is
not as useful as it could be; and fails to mention that %c parses its argument
as a string and not a C constant integer). I'm leaving this patch open as a
reminder that a doc patch is needed."

So it seems what is really needed is to update the documentation.