One Giant Robot After Another » shell scripting http://kang-chen.com/wp Kang Chen's Online Portfolio and Blog Sun, 29 Nov 2009 05:33:36 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.1 Inserting new line in echo command http://kang-chen.com/wp/2009/07/09/inserting-new-line-in-echo-command/ http://kang-chen.com/wp/2009/07/09/inserting-new-line-in-echo-command/#comments Thu, 09 Jul 2009 23:38:41 +0000 Kang http://kang-chen.com/wp/?p=20 Out of curiosity and the perfectionist in me, I “had” to print a line of text in the output inside a BASH shell script. I didn’t really want to split them into multiple echo statements since it’s a waste of space and actually harder to read for me. The first thing I tried was:

> echo “Line1\nLine2″ # Line1\nLine2

That clearly didn’t work out so well… so I thought maybe my Mac (OS X 10.5.7) likes ‘\r\n’ more:

> echo “Line1\r\nLine2″ # line1\r\nline2

Still nope! As I found out later on though, not all versions of echo supports backslash escape characters. A quick look up in the MAN page for echo revealed that I needed to pass in the -e option in order to enable this capability:

> echo -e “Line1\nLine2″

Line1
Line2

TADA! Third time is the charm!

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