On Mon, Aug 04, 2025 at 03:23:14PM -0600, Todd C. Miller wrote:
> On Mon, 04 Aug 2025 06:47:03 -0000, Miod Vallat wrote:
> 
> > > I'm not sure if there's a particular reason to treat the BEL character
> > > specially here. The \a escape has been available forever. It's in K&R.
> > > I think it's clearer, cleaner, and more consistent to use that. 
> >
> > But then you'll need to address the many other uses of \007 in the tree.
> >
> > And for the reason why \a is not used, have a look at the comment in
> > bin/ksh/c_ksh.c: at some point, pcc did not support \a.
> 
> While I would not object to changing this throughout the tree I
> don't think everything needs to be converted in one fell swoop.

I can convert them but I don't insist. miod gave me the answer I was
looking for: why?

The one-step vs two-step musings are less convincing since they don't
really explain why \r and \b are much more prevalent than their octal
representations.