Different behaviour with echo vs printf command line arguments in zsh

Question

I have a simple program to print the command line arguments in zsh. However, I see different behaviour with printf vs echo. Can anyone explain?

#!/bin/zsh
echo "$# @ : "$@"   "
printf "\n"
printf "$# *  $*   "
printf "\n"
printf "$# @ : "$@" \n"

Output:

batman$ ./args  a b c d
4 @ : a b c d   

4 *  a b c d   
4 @ : abatman$ //also gobbles up the newline!!
batman$

Many differences. For instance, printf interprets the first parameter as a format specifier. You can see the effect when you do a ./args '%s %s x y` with your example script. — user1934428
– user1934428, Commented May 11, 2021 at 6:57

Marlon Richert · Accepted Answer · 2025-06-24 12:55:31Z

1

echo and printf (and print) are different commands with different syntaxes and behaviors. Read the documentation for more info:

In Zsh, you should generally prefer print or printf over echo. print provides many more options to control how the input is parsed and where the output is sent, whereas printf gives much more control on the output is formatted. echo is mostly just there for compatibility with other shells.

edited Jun 24 at 12:55

answered May 12, 2021 at 7:48

Marlon Richert

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2 Comments

Kim Silverman Jun 23 at 22:17

I understand the advantages (and disadvantages) of 'printf', but why should we prefer 'print' over 'echo'?

Marlon Richert Jun 24 at 12:58

@KimSilverman I added a bit of explanation to my answer.

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