Formats and prints ARGUMENTS under control of the FORMAT.
Options:
-v var
[tab]assign the output to shell variable VAR rather than
[tab][tab]display it on the standard output
FORMAT is a character string which contains three types of objects: plain
characters, which are simply copied to standard output; character escape
sequences, which are converted and copied to the standard output; and
format specifications, each of which causes printing of the next successive
argument.
In addition to the standard format specifications described in printf(1),
printf interprets:
%b
[tab]expand backslash escape sequences in the corresponding argument
%q
[tab]quote the argument in a way that can be reused as shell input
%(fmt)T output the date-time string resulting from using FMT as a format
string for strftime(3)
The format is re-used as necessary to consume all of the arguments. If
there are fewer arguments than the format requires, extra format
specifications behave as if a zero value or null string, as appropriate,
had been supplied.
Exit Status:
Returns success unless an invalid option is given or a write or assignment
error occurs.
