@rl_dane

The alternative is to make the shell handle the un-escaping:

echo hello,there |sed 's/,/'"\n"'/g'

It's undocumented in several ksh flavours, but nonetheless works. However, those flavours also (trying a quick few tests) support the better way, which is also undocumented though:

echo hello,there |sed $'s/,/\n/g'

#sed #UnixShells #KornShell #OpenBSD #ksh

@rl_dane

I was curious as to what this meant, so I fired up PD ksh and tried what I thought long command-prompt entries meant.

The PD #KornShell uses a column width greater than the terminal width (which I set to 50 columns here, just to make things easier) because it SPC-pads everything to the length of the longest string; and ends up double-spacing most rows in the table as a consequence.

I couldn't figure out how to get it to specifically clip rows, though.

@rqm
#UnixShells

#Illumos has another #wordexp implementation (originating with Mortice-Kern, no less!) that expects a Korn (93) shell and uses its printf (and set -o), which might be tweakable to function with #OpenBSD's PD Korn shell; but like the GNU C library licence the Sun CDDL would likely be a problem.

https://code.illumos.org/plugins/gitiles/illumos-gate/+/refs/heads/master/usr/src/lib/libc/port/regex/wordexp.c

So if one is looking for "easily", where one just imports a compatibly-licenced and #KornShell-compatible existing implementation, the answer seems to be "No.".

#pdksh