In line 5 the expansions $x and $y are not quoted. If the expansion of $x or $y contains any IFS field separator characters, your format string argument to printf will terminate at the 1st whitespace character in the resulting set of strings passed to printf by the shell after the shell expands those variables.

When a variable name in a variable expansion is followed by characters that could be part of a variable name, use:

Code:

"${variable}other text"

instead of:

Code:

"$variableother text"

You don't have to quote and unquote every reference to a variable in a quoted string. The following all have exactly the same results in a shell script:

Code:

"$v1 $v2 ${v3}text"
"$v1"" ""$v2"" ""${v3}""text"
"$v1"" ""$v2"" ""$v3""text"
"$v1"' '"$v2"' '"${v3}"'text'
"$v1"' '"$v2"' '"$v3"'text'

The normal way to write the printf command:

Code:

printf "%b" "\x1B["$y';'$x"fWorks but is POSIX and sh compliant...\n"

even though the above will not do what you want if $y or $x expands to a string containing any whitespace characters (since both expansions are unquoted), is:

Code:

printf '\x1B[%s;%sfWorks and is POSIX and sh compliant...\n' "$y" "$x"

which will work correctly even if $x and $y expand to strings that contain percent signs and/or whitespace characters.