Vincent Lefevre wrote:
> Under UTF-8 locales:
> 
> vin:~> zsh-beta -f
> vin% emulate sh
> vin% printf ".%2s.\n" é
> . é.
> vin% /usr/bin/printf ".%2s.\n" é 
> .é.
> vin%
> 
> As you can see, the zsh printf builtin doesn't behave like the
> coreutils printf, and this is zsh which is wrong. Indeed, the
> precision is the number of bytes, not the number of characters.

That seems to me useless.  I can understand in C that a string is a
low-level entity consisting of a set of bytes, but I don't see why a
shell should force the user to count the size of a multibyte character
in the particular locale.

You can fix it by unsetting the MULTIBYTE option.

printf() { emulate -L zsh; unsetopt multibyte; builtin printf "$@" }

-- 
Peter Stephenson <pws@csr.com>                  Software Engineer
CSR PLC, Churchill House, Cambridge Business Park, Cowley Road
Cambridge, CB4 0WZ, UK                          Tel: +44 (0)1223 692070