On our UNIX system we use something like echo "All\nYes\nNo\n" in a popup box in COBOL which works fine, in linux however we need to do a echo -e "All\nYes\nNo\n"

rather than rewrite unknown lines of code to make this work, is there any way to make -e the default behavior of echo on linux?

You could add an alias in your startup script

works great on the command line...alias shows up under all profiles, but it still fails in cobol, am researching. thanks for the tip

This is not a UNIX/LINUX thing. Since the POSIX standard doesn't specify which behavior should be the default, it's left up to the individual shell to decide how to implement it.

bash, the default shell on most linux systems, does not interpret baskslash forms by default, so you have to use the -e option. I believe ksh, on the other hand, does. I don't know about other shells.

You can use bash's xpg_echo shell option to enable automatic interpretation.


Edit: To tell the truth, I'm not sure what you mean exactly by using echo "in cobol". Could you perhaps be using the external /bin/echo in cobol programs?

If so, then the same issue as the above applies, and the gnu version of echo is also designed without automatic interpretation. I don't know if there's any way to tell it to do otherwise; the documentation doesn't mention anything.

If you really want to solve your problem at the root, try switching everything to use printf instead. It's more consistent across implementations.