Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook - Third Edition

Escaping newline in echo

By default, echo appends a newline to the end of its output text. Disable the newline with the -n flag. The echo command accepts escape sequences in double-quoted strings as an argument. When using escape sequences, use echo as echo -e "string containing escape sequences". Consider the following example:

echo -e "1\t2\t3"
1  2  3