Ran across this the other day and decided it required sharing. If you want to print a new line ‘\n‘ in an echo statement in bash, one would think its just as simple as:
1 2 | beacon:~ elubow$ echo "This is a test\n" This is a test\n |
The problem is that this doesn’t interpolate the newline character. (For more information on interpolation, see Wikipedia here.) In order to have the newline interpolated, you need to add the command line switch ‘-e‘.
1 2 | beacon:~ elubow$ echo -e "This is a test\n" This is a test |
This will force Bash to interpolate any non-literal characters in the quotes. Note: Unlike Perl, single or double quotes don’t matter here when Bash is deciding whether or not to interpolate the new line characters.
