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.
According to the echo manpage, you should add '-e' to display escapes. What version of echo is on the SuSe version you mention?
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.
*** 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.