Echo newline in Bash prints literal n

Question

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

User · Answer

It works for me in CentOS   echo -e   hello nworld

User · Answer

You could always do echo      e g   echo  Hello  echo    echo  World

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Simply type   echo   to get a new line

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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    gt  amp 2  requires usage to be defined

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You could also use echo with braces      echo hello  echo world  hello world

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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

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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 in a linux I was working on with this bash   GNU bash  version 2 2 25 1 -release  x86 64-redhat-linux-gnu    Hope it helps someone with similar problem

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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 breaks inside the string   This works for me on my macOS and my Ubuntu 18 04

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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

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Additional solution     In cases  You have to echo multiline of the long contents  such as code  configurations    For example     A Bash script to generate codes  configurations   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   gt   targetFile   it need to invoke another program  tr  which should be fine IMO

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str  hello nworld    echo   sed  i str  hello world

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Are you sure you are in bash  Works for me  all four ways   echo -e  Hello nworld  echo -e  Hello nworld  echo Hello   n world echo Hello   echo world

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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  lt 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  lt 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    a Bash built-in  help echo a standalone executable  which echo   which can lead to some confusion

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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

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This works for me in Raspbian   echo -e  hello  nworld

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Try  echo -e  hello nworld  hello world   worked for me in nano editor   From the man page      -e     enable interpretation of backslash escapes

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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

User · Answer

I just use echo no arguments  echo  Hello  echo echo  World

[bash] Echo newline in Bash prints literal \n

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