Re: echo problem in Linux

[Bob Proulx]

Please group reply to the lists and not to me privately unless it is
personal.

Ronnie <address@hidden> writes:
> Thanks for your reply. As the cut 'n paste shows below, even your
> suggestion, which I had already tried unsuccessfully, is ignored or
> suppressed by the version of echo on our system.

I realize I forgot to say that 'echo' is both a shell built-in command
and an external standalone command.  By saying just 'echo' you get the
shell built-in.

> More specifically the \c did not suppress the LF and the prompt
> dropped to the next line waiting for the read input. Also as you can
> see, echo even printed the -e and ignored it as an option. A real
> pain as I cannot use it in shell scripts as is. The man page does
> show all the echo options so I am really at a loss as what to do
> now. I doubt that I can find a compiled version of echo on some
> other system and replace this one, which may need to be Redhat 6.2
> unless these binaries are compatible across all versions. Any more
> suggestions please?
> 
> address@hidden 86> echo -e "prompt: \c"; read junk
> -e prompt: \c

What shell are you using?  As soon as I make a comment that it sounds
like you are not using one of the common shells someone else will step
up and defend that shell so I won't say that.  :-)  But it looks to me
like you shell is not supporting this feature.  Read the man page for
your shell and look at the echo documentation there.

  echo $0

  man $0  # Only if it is not a login shell.  No '-'.

Try forcing the version from sh-utils / coreutils of which this list
is concerned about.  This list is for the standalone versions.  The
one built into your shell is the shell version.  We can't help with
the built in shell version.

  /bin/echo -e "prompt: \c"; read junk

Bob