from
The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (8 July 2008)
printf
<library> The standard function in the {C} programming
language library for printing formatted output.
The first argument is a format string which may contain
ordinary characters which are just printed and "conversion
specifications" - sequences beginning with '%' such as %6d
which describe how the other arguments should be printed, in
this case as a six-character decimal integer padded on the
right with spaces.
Possible conversion specifications are d, i or u (decimal
integer), o ({octal}), x, X or p ({hexadecimal}), f
({floating-point}), e or E ({mantissa} and {exponent},
e.g. 1.23E-22), g or G (f or e format as appropriate to the
value printed), c (a single character), s (a string), %
(i.e. %% - print a % character). d, i, f, e, g are signed,
the rest are unsigned.
The variant {fprintf} prints to a given output stream and
sprintf stores what would be printed in a string variable.
{Unix manual page}: printf(3).
(1996-12-08)