echo

echo [OPTIONS]... [STRING]...

Display a line of text

Options

-n

do not output the trailing newline

-e

enable interpretation of backslash escapes

-E

disable interpretation of backslash escapes (default)

Echo the STRING(s) to standard output.

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

• \ backslash
• \a alert (BEL)
• \b backspace
• \c produce no further output
• \e escape
• \f form feed
• \n new line
• \r carriage return
• \t horizontal tab
• \v vertical tab
• \0NNN byte with octal value NNN (1 to 3 digits)
• \xHH byte with hexadecimal value HH (1 to 2 digits)

Examples

Print a text message. Note: Quotes are optional:

echo "{{Hello World}}"

Print a message with environment variables:

echo "{{My path is $PATH}}"

Print a message without the trailing newline:

echo -n "{{Hello World}}"

Append a message to the file:

echo "{{Hello World}}" >> {{file.txt}}

Enable interpretation of backslash escapes (special characters):

echo -e "{{Column 1\tColumn 2}}"

Print the exit status of the last executed command (Note: In Windows Command Prompt and PowerShell the equivalent commands are echo %errorlevel% and $lastexitcode respectively):

echo $?

Pass text to another program through stdin:

echo "{{Hello World}}" | {{program}}

The examples are provided by the tldr-pages project under the CC BY 4.0 License.

Please note that, as uutils is a work in progress, some examples might fail.