I have tried numerous ways to print this line in a script:
alias myname='export PATH="/path/to/bin:$PATH"'
All of them have different problems.
The last I tried (and remember!) is:
printf '%s' '%sn' 'alias myname=' '''"export PATH="/path/to/bin:$PATH"" ''' >> ~/.bashrc
but it doesn’t work , it prints many times the PATH directory and in front of alias myname has %sn
(I prefer to use printf)
Answer
If I understand the question properly, you’re trying to add the line
alias myname='export PATH="/path/to/bin:$PATH"'
to your ~/.bashrc file
The obvious type of echo will fail because $PATH is expanded at the wrong time.
Instead we need to do some quote mixing:
echo "alias myname='export PATH="/path/to/bin:$PATH"'" >> ~/.bashrc
Now you say, for some reason, you want to use printf. So we can do similar:
printf "%sn" "alias myname='export PATH="/path/to/bin:$PATH"'" >> ~/.bashrc
If you want to treat the two sides of the = as separate strings:
printf "%s=%sn" "alias myname" "'export PATH="/path/to/bin:$PATH"'" >> ~/.bashrc
And so on.
(printf only takes one format argument and then a list of values).