For:
$hello="hello > world"
Why does echo
not print the newline for:
echo -e $hello
But if I put $hello
in quotes it does.
$ echo "$hello" hello world
Is this because of ANSI-C Quoting? Shouldn't echo -e
interpret the newline I inputted?
From the bash
man page, this describes how word splitting is done according the contents of the IFS
variable:
Word Splitting
The shell scans the results of parameter expansion, command substitution, and arithmetic expansion that did not occur within double quotes for word splitting.
The shell treats each character of
IFS
as a delimiter, and splits the results of the other expansions into words using these characters as field terminators. IfIFS
is unset, or its value is exactly<space><tab><newline>
, the default, then sequences of<space>
,<tab>
, and<newline>
at the beginning and end of the results of the previous expansions are ignored, and any sequence of IFS characters not at the beginning or end serves to delimit words. IfIFS
has a value other than the default, then sequences of the whitespace characters space and tab are ignored at the beginning and end of the word, as long as the whitespace character is in the value ofIFS
(anIFS
whitespace character). Any character inIFS
that is notIFS
whitespace, along with any adjacentIFS
whitespace characters, delimits a field. A sequence ofIFS
whitespace characters is also treated as a delimiter. If the value ofIFS
is null, no word splitting occurs.Explicit null arguments (
""
or''
) are retained. Unquoted implicit null arguments, resulting from the expansion of parameters that have no values, are removed. If a parameter with no value is expanded within double quotes, a null argument results and is retained.Note that if no expansion occurs, no splitting is performed.
bash
does word splitting on your variable if it is not double quoted so hello
and world
become two different arguments to echo
. echo
puts a space between arguments.
$hello
without the quotes undergoes shell splitting.$IFS
- this is covered exhaustively elsewhere. @DisplayName - this doesn't, in fact, have much to do with trailing\n
ewlines but is rather a result of the shell's default split configuration on its Internal Field Separator. And alsoecho
's handling of arguments - it concatenates them on spaces.echo
does that - they're\000
NULs. They're separate fields.