Echo newline in Bash prints literal \n

How do I print a newline? This merely prints \n:

$ echo -e "Hello,\nWorld!"
Hello,\nWorld!

10

22 Answers

Use printf instead:

printf "hello\nworld\n"

printf behaves more consistently across different environments than echo.

18

Make sure you are in Bash.

$ echo $0
bash

All these four ways work for me:

echo -e "Hello\nworld"
echo -e 'Hello\nworld'
echo Hello$'\n'world
echo Hello ; echo world

15

echo $'hello\nworld'

prints

hello
world

$'' strings use ANSI C Quoting:

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.

7

You could always do echo "".

For example,

echo "Hello,"
echo ""
echo "World!"

5

On 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:

#!/bin/bash
function GET_RECORDS()
{ echo -e "starting\n the process";
}
echo $(GET_RECORDS);

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:

#!/bin/bash
function GET_RECORDS()
{ echo -e "starting\n the process";
}
GET_RECORDS;

1

Simply type

echo

to get a new line

7

POSIX 7 on echo

-e is not defined and backslashes are implementation defined:

If the first operand is -n, or if any of the operands contain a <backslash> character, the results are implementation-defined.

unless you have an optional XSI extension.

So I recommend that you should use printf instead, which is well specified:

format operand shall be used as the format string described in XBD File Format Notation [...]

the File Format Notation:

\n <newline> Move the printing position to the start of the next line.

Also keep in mind that Ubuntu 15.10 and most distros implement echo both as:

• a Bash built-in: help echo
• a standalone executable: which echo

which can lead to some confusion.

str='hello\nworld'
$ echo | sed "i$str"
hello
world

2

You can also do:

echo "hello
world"

This works both inside a script and from the command line.

On the command line, press Shift+Enter to do the line break inside the string.

This works for me on my macOS and my Ubuntu 18.04 (Bionic Beaver) system.

0

There is a new parameter expansion added in Bash 4.4 that interprets escape sequences:

${parameter@operator} - E operator

The expansion is a string that is the value of parameter with backslash escape sequences expanded as with the $'…' quoting mechanism.

$ foo='hello\nworld'
$ echo "${foo@E}"
hello
world

1

I just use echo without any arguments:

echo "Hello"
echo
echo "World"

1

To print a new line with echo, use:

echo

or

echo -e '\n'

1

This could better be done as

x="\n"
echo -ne $x

-e option will interpret backslahes for the escape sequence
-n option will remove the trailing newline in the output

PS: the command echo has an effect of always including a trailing newline in the output so -n is required to turn that thing off (and make it less confusing)

1

If you're writing scripts and will be echoing newlines as part of other messages several times, a nice cross-platform solution is to put a literal newline in a variable like so:

newline='
'
echo "first line$newlinesecond line"
echo "Error: example error message n${newline}${usage}" >&2 #requires usage to be defined

My script:

echo "WARNINGS: $warningsFound WARNINGS FOUND:\n$warningStrings

Output:

WARNING : 2 WARNINGS FOUND:\nWarning, found the following local orphaned signature file:

On my Bash script I was getting mad as you until I've just tried:

echo "WARNING : $warningsFound WARNINGS FOUND:
$warningStrings"

Just hit Enter where you want to insert that jump. The output now is:

WARNING : 2 WARNINGS FOUND:
Warning, found the following local orphaned signature file:

3

If the previous answers don't work, and there is a need to get a return value from their function:

function foo()
{ local v="Dimi"; local s=""; ..... s+="Some message here $v $1\n" ..... echo $s
}
r=$(foo "my message");
echo -e $r;

Only this trick worked on a Linux system I was working on with this Bash version:

GNU bash, version 2.2.25(1)-release (x86_64-redhat-linux-gnu)

You could also use echo with braces,

$ (echo hello; echo world)
hello
world

4

This got me there....

outstuff=RESOURCE_GROUP=[$RESOURCE_GROUP]\\nAKS_CLUSTER_NAME=[$AKS_CLUSTER_NAME]\\nREGION_NAME=[$REGION_NAME]\\nVERSION=[$VERSION]\\nSUBNET-ID=[$SUBNET_ID]
printf $outstuff

Yields:

RESOURCE_GROUP=[akswork-rg]
AKS_CLUSTER_NAME=[aksworkshop-804]
REGION_NAME=[eastus]
VERSION=[1.16.7]
SUBNET-ID=[/subscriptions/{subidhere}/resourceGroups/makeakswork-rg/providers/

2

Sometimes you can pass multiple strings separated by a space and it will be interpreted as \n.

For example when using a shell script for multi-line notifcations:

#!/bin/bash
notify-send 'notification success' 'another line' 'time now '`date +"%s"`

1

For only the question asked (not special characters etc) changing only double quotes to single quotes.

echo -e 'Hello,\nWorld!'

Results in:

Hello,
World!

With jq:

$ jq -nr '"Hello,\nWorld"'
Hello,
World

Additional solution:

In cases, you have to echo a multiline of the long contents (such as code/ configurations)

For example:

• A Bash script to generate codes/ configurations

echo -e,printf might have some limitation

You can use some special char as a placeholder as a line break (such as ~) and replace it after the file was created using tr:

echo ${content} | tr '~' '\n' > $targetFile

It needs to invoke another program (tr) which should be fine, IMO.

1