Good job digging up the history behind it. it was a really interesting read !

Reading the source code for echo under different implementations has been an exercise many people have taken to compare code complexity (obviously, GNU "wins" here).

I personally only use "echo" to print out debug statements, or quickly output a variable name. For example, all my scripts feature this snippet:


Whenever I need to print out formatted stuff, printf(1) is my goto as it is much more convenient.