Try this: printf "%8*s" foobarblatt It will loop forever. The man page would tend to indicate that it, or perhaps rather %*8s, should print the arg truncated to 8 characters. Either way, it shouldn't loop. How-To-Repeat: See above.
State Changed From-To: open->closed Mostly pilot error; the syntax checking for the argument string has been made more strict with version 1.2 of printf.c, so "%*8s" is no longer considered to be a valid format string.