I find it sort of funny that there is also an application that does printf formatting, with GNU sh-utils. Watch:
$ printf "%s%s %s %i\n" foo bar baz 256
foobar baz 256
$
Gee, that was so useless! Especially considering all the command line args are passed as strings. But I guess it could be "useful" for shell scripting.. Oh yeah, and %x..