Command Line Expansion & echo

Merrida · 05-25-2009, 06:11 PM

Hi all

I am having trouble with new line character substitution on the command line output : Fedora10

have tried the following:
echo text one `\n' text two
-- note grave accent followed by backslash, char n and lastly single quote

echo -e text one `\n' text two

echo text one $'\n' text two

I get either a) errors or be ) the secondary prompt > with not output

what I am trying to do is produce the following from the above command:
[Fedora10]$
text one
text two
[Fedora10]$

thanks
J

MensaWater · 05-25-2009, 06:24 PM

Put double quotes around the whole line to be echoed:
echo "text one \n text two"

Also I notice the character you have before the \n and after it are not the same so it wouldn't work. Quoting characters must match.

david1941 · 05-25-2009, 06:26 PM

try:

Code:

 echo -e "text one \ntext two\n"

Dave

archShade · 05-25-2009, 08:18 PM

also echo -e 'text one \ntext two'

note missing space after \n othewise output will be

text one
_text two

I used underscore where you would have space because LQ flattend the lines

I think the quotes in your original preserve \n as the two charater rather than a newline.

Merrida · 05-26-2009, 12:30 AM

Thanks for the suggestions

Finally got it to work with echo -e text one\\ntext two

A colleague suggested that something is weird with the terminal settings ... do you think this could the problem?

BTW Fedora session is being run inside VM Server

seems strange that Ubuntu, Centos, Fedora 5 had no problem with the suggestions & previous attempts
(had friends at uni check this out on other Linux versions)