Appending a line break to an output file in a shell script

Question

I have a shell script that I am executing in Cygwin  maybe this is the problem   For this bit of code  I simply want to write the first line  and append a line break   echo   date  User  whoami  started the script    gt  gt  output log echo  gt  gt  output log   But the output log file never seems to take the break  If I run the script multiple times  it s as if the second echo doesn t write to the file   I ve also tried   echo -e   date  User  whoami  started the script  n   gt  gt  output log   It yields the same results   The odd thing is if I just enter the second echo statement above on the command line  without appending to the file  it gives me the expected output with the trailing line break

User · Answer

Try   echo   date  User  whoami  started the script     n   gt  gt  output log   or just   echo    n   gt  gt  output log

User · Answer

Try   echo -en   date  User  whoami  started the script  n   gt  gt  output log   Try issuing this multiple times  I hope you are looking for the same output

User · Answer

I m betting the problem is that Cygwin is writing Unix line endings  LF  to the file  and you re opening it with a program that expects Windows line-endings  CRLF   To determine if this is the case  mdash  and for a bit of a hackish workaround  mdash  try   echo   date  User  whoami  started the script     r   gt  gt  output log    where the    r  at the end is an extra carriage-return  it  plus the Unix line ending  will result in a Windows line ending

User · Answer

this also works  and prolly is more readable than the echo version  printf  quot  date  User  whoami  started the script  r n quot   gt  gt  output log

User · Answer

You can do that without an I O redirection   sed -i  s    n   filename   You can also use this command to append a newline to a list of files   find dir -name filepattern   xargs sed -i  s    n   filename   For echo  some shells implement it as a shell builtin command  It might not accept the -e option  If you still want to use echo  try to find where the echo binary file is  using which echo  In most cases  it is located in  bin echo  so you can use  bin echo -e   n  to echo a new line

[bash] Appending a line break to an output file in a shell script

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