In Bash, tried this:
echo -e "Hello,\nWorld!"
But it doesn't print a newline, only \n
. How can I make it print the newline?
I'm using Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal).
In Bash, tried this:
echo -e "Hello,\nWorld!"
But it doesn't print a newline, only \n
. How can I make it print the newline?
I'm using Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal).
You could use printf
instead:
printf "hello\nworld\n"
printf
has more consistent behavior than echo
. The behavior of echo
varies greatly between different versions.
Make sure you are in Bash. All these four ways work for me:
echo -e "Hello\nworld"
echo -e 'Hello\nworld'
echo Hello$'\n'world
echo Hello ; echo world
echo $'hello\nworld'
prints
hello
world
$''
strings use ANSI C Quoting:
Words of the form
$'string'
are treated specially. The word expands to string, with backslash-escaped characters replaced as specified by the ANSI C standard.
You could always do echo ""
.
For example,
echo "Hello,"
echo ""
echo "World!"
Try
echo -e "hello\nworld"
hello
world
worked for me in nano
editor.
From the man page:
-e
enable interpretation of backslash escapes
In the off chance that someone finds themselves beating their head against the wall trying to figure out why a coworker's script won't print newlines, look out for this ->
#!/bin/bash
function GET_RECORDS()
{
echo -e "starting\n the process";
}
echo $(GET_RECORDS);
As in the above, the actual running of the method may itself be wrapped in an echo which supersedes any echos that may be in the method itself. Obviously I watered this down for brevity, it was not so easy to spot!
You can then inform your comrades that a better way to execute functions would be like so:
#!/bin/bash
function GET_RECORDS()
{
echo -e "starting\n the process";
}
GET_RECORDS;
This works for me in Raspbian,
echo -e "hello\\nworld"
POSIX 7 on echo
http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/echo.html
-e
is not defined and backslashes are implementation defined:
If the first operand is -n, or if any of the operands contain a <backslash> character, the results are implementation-defined.
unless you have an optional XSI extension.
So I recommend that you should use printf
instead, which is well specified:
format operand shall be used as the format string described in XBD File Format Notation [...]
the File Format Notation:
\n <newline> Move the printing position to the start of the next line.
Also keep in mind that Ubuntu 15.10 and most distros implement echo
both as:
help echo
which echo
which can lead to some confusion.
str='hello\nworld'
$ echo | sed "i$str"
hello
world
You can also do:
echo "hello
world"
This works both inside a script and from the command line.
In the command line, press Shift+Enter to do the line break inside the string.
This works for me on my macOS and my Ubuntu 18.04
One more entry here for those that didn't make it work with any of these solutions, and need to get a return value from their function:
function foo()
{
local v="Dimi";
local s="";
.....
s+="Some message here $v $1\n"
.....
echo $s
}
r=$(foo "my message");
echo -e $r;
Only this trick worked on a Linux system I was working on with this Bash version:
GNU bash, version 2.2.25(1)-release (x86_64-redhat-linux-gnu)
My script:
echo "WARNINGS: $warningsFound WARNINGS FOUND:\n$warningStrings
Output:
WARNING : 2 WARNINGS FOUND:\nWarning, found the following local orphaned signature file:
On my bash script I was getting mad as you until I've just tried:
echo "WARNING : $warningsFound WARNINGS FOUND:
$warningStrings"
Just hit enter where you want to insert that jump. Output now is:
WARNING : 2 WARNINGS FOUND:
Warning, found the following local orphaned signature file:
This could better be done as
x="\n"
echo -ne $x
-e option will interpret backslahes for the escape sequence
-n option will remove the trailing newline in the output
PS: the command echo has an effect of always including a trailing newline in the output so -n is required to turn that thing off (and make it less confusing)
There is a new parameter expansion added in bash 4.4
that interprets escape sequences:
${parameter@operator} - E operator
The expansion is a string that is the value of parameter with backslash escape sequences expanded as with the
$'…'
quoting mechanism.
$ foo='hello\nworld'
$ echo "${foo@E}"
hello
world
If you're writing scripts and will be echoing newlines as part of other messages several times, a nice cross-platform solution is to put a literal newline in a variable like so:
newline='
'
echo "first line$newlinesecond line"
echo "Error: example error message n${newline}${usage}" >&2 #requires usage to be defined
You could also use echo with braces,
$ (echo hello; echo world)
hello
world
This may not apply in your case, but it's something that has confused me in the past:
Writing "hello\nworld"
in Bash gives you a string with a new-line character in it, and echo -e
prints that exact string.
Writing $'hello\nworld'
or
"hello
world"
gives you a string with a new-line character in it, and plain echo
prints that exact string. Which is good, since as you've seen, echo -e
isn't always supported.
Sometimes you can pass multiple strings separated by a space and it will be interpreted as \n
.
For example when using a shell script for multi-line notifcations:
#!/bin/bash
notify-send 'notification success' 'another line' 'time now '`date +"%s"`
This got me there....
outstuff=RESOURCE_GROUP=[$RESOURCE_GROUP]\\nAKS_CLUSTER_NAME=[$AKS_CLUSTER_NAME]\\nREGION_NAME=[$REGION_NAME]\\nVERSION=[$VERSION]\\nSUBNET-ID=[$SUBNET_ID]
printf $outstuff
Yields:
RESOURCE_GROUP=[akswork-rg]
AKS_CLUSTER_NAME=[aksworkshop-804]
REGION_NAME=[eastus]
VERSION=[1.16.7]
SUBNET-ID=[/subscriptions/{subidhere}/resourceGroups/makeakswork-rg/providers/Microsoft.Network/virtualNetworks/aks-vnet/subnets/aks-subnet]
Additional solution :
In cases, You have to echo multiline of the long contents (such as code/ configurations)
For example :
echo -e
,
printf
might have some limitation
You can use some special char as a placeholder as a line break (such as ~
)
and replace it after the file was created using tr
echo ${content} | tr '~' '\n' > $targetFile
it need to invoke another program (tr
) which should be fine IMO.