Bart wrote:
> 
> Am I understanding correctly that the intent here is that é is a two-
> byte character so %2s should print the two literal bytes, rather than
> print the single logical character in a field two logical characters
> wide?

That's correct. The POSIX definition uses bytes. For multibyte
behaviour, there is an L modifier. I don't really see the sense in it
myself: I don't want to write low-level stuff in the shell.

Frank Terbeck wrote:
> Frankly, that would be the vendor's fault then. There are many *MANY*
> ksh implementations, that make for a reasonable link target (ksh93,
> pdksh or mksh - to name just a few). Zsh is not one of them.

The fact that zsh is far from a perfect emulation doesn't stop it from
being useful. I don't necessarily want to install a separate ksh package
and zsh will run ksh scripts at least as well as pdksh.

Oliver