On Mon, Aug 04, 2025 at 09:17:59PM -0600, Theo de Raadt wrote:
> Theo Buehler <tb@theobuehler.org> wrote:
> 
> > 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.
> 
> \r is used a ton in the MSDOS environment.
> 
> \b has various uses.
> 
> \a or even \007 is astoundingly extremely rare.
> 
> My two-step "musings" were saying that \a is undiscoverable.

As far as I can recall, every list of escapes I've ever seen listed all
three of them so the notion that \a is somehow worse than the others did
not occur to me.

> Is \a prettier?

On the one line I wanted to change, I thought the answer was obviously
yes for reasons of consistency. I find its current unexplained version
odd and ugly, hence I sent the diff. In general I don't really care.

I did not suggest a tree sweep. I'm not keen on doing that nor do I think
it's necessary. Independently of whether that diff goes in or not.