Linux echo without new line

How To Echo Without Newline

The ‘echo’ command will always add a new line when you run it in a command console. This is convenient when you want to print out environmental variables and other pieces of information. It separates the individual pieces of information in the command and makes it easy to identify.

But, if you want to copy the output and use it in another console, the extra line may be an issue. Also, if you need to use the echo command but you want to build a CSV file, the invisible line can make all your efforts futile.

This article will explain how to use the ‘echo’ command without creating a new line for different platforms.

How to Echo Without Newline in Windows Command Prompt

If you have Windows 10, you can access Command Prompt to input your commands. There are ways where the new line can cause issues, especially if you want to copy the output and use it outside of Command Prompt.

So, if you type in ‘echo 1’ as the command in your prompt, you’ll get 1 as an output, followed by a new line and another input line.

But if you want to use the same command without adding a new line, you need to type in additional commands after ‘echo’.

Let’s go over it step by step:

1. Press ‘Windows’ and ‘R’ key at the same time to open the ‘Run’ window.
2. Type ‘cmd’ in the Open box.
   
3. Type the following command in Command Prompt:
   echo | set /p=your text or variable (in this example it’s ‘1’)
4. Press ‘Enter’ to execute this command.
5. You should not see a new line in between.
   
   If you want to copy the output to the clipboard, you’ll have to use the ‘echo’ command with the ‘clip’ command.
6. Use the following code:
   echo | set /p=your text or variable|clip
7. The ‘clip’ command will copy the text or variable to the clipboard.
8. Open any text tool. For example, Notepad.
9. Paste the clipboard to it.
10. You should see your output in a string of text in Notepad.
    

How to Echo Without Newline in Bash

Bash is the command console in Linux and Mac OS, which also recognizes the ‘echo’ command. In the case of Bash, echo also creates a new line in the output, but you can use different steps to stop it.

The best way to remove the new line is to add ‘-n’. This signals not to add a new line.

When you want to write more complicated commands or sort everything in a single line, you should use the ‘-n’ option.

For example, if you input the code:
for x in $
do
echo $x
done| sort

The ‘echo $x’ command will sort the variables into separate lines. It may look something like this:
1
2
3
4
5

So, it won’t print the numbers on the same line.

There’s a way to display the output on a single line; you only have to use the ‘-n’ command.

It’d look like this:

Hit return and you should see the numbers on the same line.

Echo with Printf Command in Bash

Another way to avoid adding a new line with ‘echo’ is to combine it with the ‘printf’ command.

For example, let’s use the following code:
NewLine=`printf “n”`
echo -e “Line1$Line2”

Without adding space after “n”, you’ll get this result:

However, if you add a space after “n” like this:
NewLine=`printf “n “`
echo -e “Line1Line2”

You’ll get the following result:
Line1
Line2

If you want all your input to print on the same line for some reason, you can always use the first example.

What About PowerShell?

Windows’ PowerShell doesn’t create a newline with the echo command. But if you want to add content directly to a text file via PowerShell, you should type the ‘-NoNewline’ command after the text or variable.

This is extremely useful for building a CSV file, for example. Or, if for some reason you need all your variables to remain on the same line.

Note that without the ‘-NoNewLine’ command, the will still automatically move to a new line after reaching the end of a line.

Thor’s Echo

Now that you know how to avoid adding a newline with echo, you can continue your coding.

If you know of other methods for accomplishing, don’t forget to share with the community in the comments. Many thanks in advance.

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append text with echo without new line

I want to append text to file like echo «abc» >>file.txt .

But this add abc after new line

How can I add abc in the end of file with echo without new line?

6 Answers 6

Assuming that the file does not already end in a newline and you simply want to append some more text without adding one, you can use the -n argument, e.g.

However, some UNIX systems do not provide this option; if that is the case you can use printf , e.g.

(the initial %s argument being to guard against the additional text having % formatting characters in it)

From man echo (on macOS High Sierra):

Do not print the trailing newline character. This may also be achieved by appending ‘\c’ to the end of the string, as is done by iBCS2 compatible systems. Note that this option as well as the effect of ‘\c’ are implementation-defined in IEEE Std 1003.1-2001 («POSIX.1») as amended by Cor. 1-2002. Applications aiming for maximum portability are strongly encouraged to use printf(1) to suppress the newline character.

echo «abc» >>file.txt puts a newline after abc , not before. If you end up with abc on its own line, that means that the newline before abc was already present in file.txt .

Note that it is perfectly normal for a text file to end in a newline. On unix, a line consists of a sequence of characters other than null⁰ or newline followed by a newline. 1 Therefore any non-empty text file ends with a newline character.

If you want to add text to the last line of a file, then you can’t do it with >> , because this always appends to the file, so it always writes after the last newline. Instead you need a tool that is capable of modifying an existing file. For example, you can use sed:

In the sed command, the first $ means “do the following command only on the last line”, the command s/REGEX/REPLACEMENT/ replaces REGEX by REPLACEMENT, and the regular expression $ matches at the end of the line.

Linux’s sed command has a built-in feature to automate this create-new-file-and-replace sequence, so you can shorten that to

⁰ _{That’s a null byte, which ASCII calls NUL and Unicode calls U+0000. Text processing programs may or may not cope with this character.}
1 _{See the definitions of Text File, Line, and Newline Character in the «Definitions» section of the Base Definitions chapter of IEEE 1003.1-2008:2016.}

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«echo -n» prints «-n»

I have a problem with echo in my script:

and moves to the next line. In the console it’s working correcly without newline:

11 Answers 11

There are multiple versions of the echo command, with different behaviors. Apparently the shell used for your script uses a version that doesn’t recognize -n .

The printf command has much more consistent behavior. echo is fine for simple things like echo hello , but I suggest using printf for anything more complicated.

What system are you on, and what shell does your script use?

bash has a «built-in» command called «echo»:

Additionally, there is an «echo» command that is a proper executable (that is, the shell forks and execs /bin/echo , as opposed to interpreting echo and executing it):

The behavior of either echo ‘s WRT to \c and -n varies. Your best bet is to use printf , which is available on four different *NIX flavors that I looked at:

It works for me as expected (as I understood from your question).

Note that I got this information from the man page. The man page also notes the shell may have its own version of echo , and I am not sure if bash has its own version.

To achieve this there are basically two methods which I frequently use:

1. Using the cursor escape character ( \c ) with echo -e

• -e flag enables the Escape characters in the string.
• \c brings the Cursor back to the current line.

2. Using the printf command

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Echo newline in Bash prints literal \n

In Bash, tried this:

But it doesn’t print a newline, only \n . How can I make it print the newline?

I’m using Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal).

23 Answers 23

You could use printf instead:

printf has more consistent behavior than echo . The behavior of echo varies greatly between different versions.

Make sure you are in Bash. All these four ways work for me:

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.

You could always do echo «» .

It worked for me in the nano editor.

From the man page:

-e enable interpretation of backslash escapes

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:

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:

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Windows batch: echo without new line

What is the Windows batch equivalent of the Linux shell command echo -n which suppresses the newline at the end of the output?

The idea is to write on the same line inside a loop.

20 Answers 20

Using set and the /p parameter you can echo without newline:

Using: echo | set /p= or will both work to suppress the newline.

However, this can be very dangerous when writing more advanced scripts when checking the ERRORLEVEL becomes important as setting set /p= without specifying a variable name will set the ERRORLEVEL to 1.

A better approach would be to just use a dummy variable name like so:
echo | set /p dummyName=Hello World

This will produce exactly what you want without any sneaky stuff going on in the background as I had to find out the hard way, but this only works with the piped version; will still raise the ERRORLEVEL to 1.

The simple SET /P method has limitations that vary slightly between Windows versions.

Leading quotes may be stripped

Leading white space may be stripped

Leading = causes a syntax error.

jeb posted a clever solution that solves most of the problems at Output text without linefeed, even with leading space or = I’ve refined the method so that it can safely print absolutely any valid batch string without the new line, on any version of Windows from XP onward. Note that the :writeInitialize method contains a string literal that may not post well to the site. A remark is included that describes what the character sequence should be.

The :write and :writeVar methods are optimized such that only strings containing troublesome leading characters are written using my modified version of jeb’s COPY method. Non-troublesome strings are written using the simpler and faster SET /P method.

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