Echo

echo is a shell command which prints data to the screen (well, stdout actually). (You may recognize it from some programming languages - Perl and PHP both use it)

For example:

$ echo Hello World Hello World $

If run in the context of a shell script, then you can allow echo to print the contents of variables by prefixing the variable name with a dollar sign. For example:

$ x=`date` $ echo $x Sat Aug 7 12:57:04 UTC 2004 $

It is also possible to output ASCII data. The syntax is echo -e "\0NNN" where NNN is the ascii number in octal format. To output an A (ascii code 65), use echo -e "\0101" To output all ASCII charaters, use for l in $(seq 0 1 7); do for i in $(seq 0 1 7); do for n in $(seq 0 1 7); do \ echo -en "\0${l}${i}${n} ";done;  done;done

= Provided by =

Most shells provide this as a builtin, but this is also present in the GNU Coreutils as a utility. The two forms may have different behavior. Most (all?) Linux distributions incorporate the utility from the GNU Coreutils: man page

= Tips =
 * 1) Because of behavior differences, you are usually best off to decide on one of the forms and always use that form.  Life is less confusing that way.

= Related Commands =
 * printf(command) - Formatted printing for shell scripts.
 * yes - Output forever.

= See also =
 * builtin for tips on shell commands.
 * shell script
 * Hello World