Why doesn't \c work in sh/ksh echo on Suns?

Chuck Karish karish at denali.stanford.edu
Fri Aug 5 01:52:25 AEST 1988


In article <19256 at tut.cis.ohio-state.edu> lvc at tut.cis.ohio-state.edu (Lawrence V. Cipriani) writes:
>On the Sun 3/50's here at Ohio State University sh and ksh don't
>work correctly when echo is given a string that terminates with
>a \c.

echo is a utility program, not a shell built-in, on SunOS.  It sounds
as if you're getting the BSD echo rather than the Sys5 echo.  BSD echo
suppresses the newline with the '-n' command line flag, not with a '\c'
in the string.

The manual page suggests that you choose the version you want by the
placement of /usr/bin and /usr/5bin in your search path.  I checked
this on a machine that runs Version 3.2.

Another approach, which should work anywhere, would be to do

	echo "Enter terminal type:" | tr '\012' ' '

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