Using echo with options
So far, in this book we have been able to see that the echo
command is very useful and is going to be in many of our scripts, if not all. We have also seen that this is both a built-in command as well as a command file. When running the echo
command, the built-in command will be used unless we state the full path to the file. We can test this with the following command:
$ test -a echo
To gain help on the built-in command, we can use man bash
and search for echo
; however, the echo
command is identical to the internal command so I will recommend that you use man echo
in most cases in order to display command options.
The basic use of echo
that we have seen so far will produce a text output and a new line. This is often the desired response so we don't have to be concerned that the next prompt will append to the end of the echoed text. The new line separates the script output from the next shell prompt. If we do not supply any text string to print, echo
will print...