On Tue, Apr 03, 2007 at 03:32:20PM +0100, David Reynolds wrote:
On 3 Apr 2007, at 3:14 pm, Chris G wrote:
On Tue, Apr 03, 2007 at 02:12:57PM +0100, David Reynolds wrote:
On 3 Apr 2007, at 1:43 pm, Chris G wrote:
Been there, done that, doesn't work for me! :-)
chrisg$ export fred="abcde \n fghij" chrisg$ echo "$fred" abcde \n fghij chrisg$
You missed the '-e' after the echo, but as Ted says, it looks like MJ got it.
Ah, oops, so I did. So now it's working for me too. Thanks all.
I think my problem was reading the man page for echo which says:-
-e enable interpretation of backslash escapes -E disable interpretation of backslash escapes (default)
as that doesn't suggest to me anything like what it actually does! I think what it's actually doing is echoing the characters as they *really* are when you give it -e whereas with -E it turns any white space into a single space.