Rubenerd

In my continuing series of things you already know, unless you don’t, today I learned of an alternative to printing strings in the shell, sans newline.

I was reading the FreeBSD sh(1) manpage, like a gentleman:

 echo [-e | -n] [string ...]
   Print a space-separated list of the arguments to the
   standard output and append a newline character.
 
   -n  Suppress the output of the trailing newline.

Sure enough:

$ echo saywhat
==> saywhat
==> $

And with -n:

$ echo -n saywhat
==> saywhat$

This whole time I’d been doing this to avoid a newline:

$ printf '%s' saywhat

Good ol’ Kenneth Almquist, and the FreeBSD maintainers :).

But does this also apply to csh, the shell and scripting language allegedly considered harmful, and therefore you should write in? Under echo_style in the tcsh(1) manpage:

bsd  Don't echo a newline if the first argument is `-n`;
     the default for csh.

Boom!