data:processing:shell:echo

About

This page is about the echo executable of the Gnu utility package that implements an echo functionality.

echo is also often implemented as a shell built-in command:

To echo a string:

/bin/echo [OPTION]... [STRING]...

where:

If -e is in effect, the following sequences are recognized:

This characters are control characters.

The echo utility is found:

on linux at /bin/echo
on windows: installed with Git - Git (executable|command line) at Git_Home\usr\bin\echo.exe

In bash, with the type command, you can check if it's the echo bash builtin command and not GNU echo.

type echo

echo is a shell builtin

echo -e "hello Nico\nHello Nico"!

hello Nico
Hello Nico!

echo 'hello Nico\nHello Nico!'

hello Nico
Hello Nico!

By default, echo outputs along a newline character at the end. This behavior can be disabled with the -n options

Example within the bash shell:

with -n, no newline character will be added and the sequence of number will be on one line

for a in `seq 10`
do
  echo -n "$a "
done

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

without -n (default), a newline character will be added and the sequence of number will be on multiple line

for a in `seq 10`
do
  echo "$a "
done