Copyright (c) 1988 Sun Microsystems, Inc - All Rights Reserved.
The contents of this file are subject to the terms of the Common Development and Distribution License (the "License"). You may not use this file except in compliance with the License.
You can obtain a copy of the license at usr/src/OPENSOLARIS.LICENSE or http://www.opensolaris.org/os/licensing. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.
When distributing Covered Code, include this CDDL HEADER in each file and include the License file at usr/src/OPENSOLARIS.LICENSE. If applicable, add the following below this CDDL HEADER, with the fields enclosed by brackets "[]" replaced with your own identifying information: Portions Copyright [yyyy] [name of copyright owner]
/usr/ucb/echo [-n] [argument]
echo writes its arguments, separated by BLANKs and terminated by a NEWLINE, to the standard output.
echo is useful for producing diagnostics in command files and for sending known data into a pipe, and for displaying the contents of environment variables.
For example, you can use echo to determine how many subdirectories below the root directory (/) is your current directory, as follows:
echo your current-working-directory's full pathname
pipe the output through tr to translate the path's embedded slash-characters into space-characters
pipe that output through wc -w for a count of the names in your path.
example% /usr/bin/echo "echo $PWD | tr '/' ' ' | wc -w"
See tr(1) and wc(1) for their functionality.
The shells csh(1), ksh(1), and sh(1), each have an echo built-in command, which, by default, will have precedence, and will be invoked if the user calls echo without a full pathname. /usr/ucb/echo and csh's echo() have an -n option, but do not understand back-slashed escape characters. sh's echo(), ksh's echo(), and /usr/bin/echo, on the other hand, understand the black-slashed escape characters, and ksh's echo() also understands \ea as the audible bell character; however, these commands do not have an -n option.
Do not add the NEWLINE to the output.
csh(1), echo(1), ksh(1), sh(1), tr(1), wc(1), attributes(5)
The -n option is a transition aid for BSD applications, and may not be supported in future releases.