Bug 6498

Summary:	'echo' escapes displayed not interpreted
Product:	[Retired] Red Hat Linux	Reporter:	stevec
Component:	sh-utils	Assignee:	Bill Nottingham <notting>
Status:	CLOSED WONTFIX	QA Contact:
Severity:	medium	Docs Contact:
Priority:	medium
Version:	6.1	CC:	jcassell, rvokal
Target Milestone:	---
Target Release:	---
Hardware:	i386
OS:	Linux
Whiteboard:
Fixed In Version:		Doc Type:	Bug Fix
Doc Text:		Story Points:	---
Clone Of:		Environment:
Last Closed:	1999-11-09 19:51:14 UTC	Type:	---
Regression:	---	Mount Type:	---
Documentation:	---	CRM:
Verified Versions:		Category:	---
oVirt Team:	---	RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team:	---	Target Upstream Version:
Embargoed:

Description stevec 1999-10-29 13:56:16 UTC

An install script we write fails in RH6.1, and not in AIX,
Solaris, RH5.0, or Suse.  The reason is that a

/bin/echo "mytext\n" >> /myfile

command is placing \n in the file rather than a newline.
Recall that this is fine on other platforms.  Another
feature is:

$ echo hello\c
helloc
$ exit

rather than:

$ echo hello\c
hello$ exit

The problem exists in /bin/echo whether run from bash or
tcsh, and in bash's builtin but not in tcsh's builtin.

Comment 1 Bill Nottingham 1999-10-29 15:32:59 UTC

According to the echo manpage, you should add
'-e' to display escapes.

What version of echo is on the SuSe version you mention?

Comment 2 Bill Nottingham 1999-11-08 16:02:59 UTC

Hmm.... looking at the Changelog for sh-utils, it looks like
that the default of *not* interpreting backslash characters
is the POSIX thing to do.

Comment 3 Bill Nottingham 1999-11-09 16:27:59 UTC

*** Bug 6768 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

/bin/echo and echo no longer interpret the newline escape
character embedded in a string. E.G.

TMP="This is some text"
TMP=${TMP}"\nwith a newline in the middle"

/bin/echo ${TMP}

This code work fine in 6.0 and other flavors of unix:

This is some text
with a newline in the middle

but in RH 6.1 this is the output:

This is some text\nwith a newline in the middle

This bug has cost us a lot of time and money! What are you
guys smoking over there?! (sorry)


------- Additional Comments From jcassell  11/08/99 15:16 -------
BTW, I neglected to mention, the bug-like echo behavior is exhibited
in a Bourne shell script - i.e. #!/bin/sh.