powershell cannot write newline character

Question

"b`nc" | out-file "a.txt"

output is:

bc

What is the correct way to write a string containing a newline character.

THanks

Answer 1

Windows system use carriage return + endline (\r\n) like this :

"b`r`nc" | out-file "c:\temp\a.txt"

if you want Something which work on multi-plateform try this:

'b' + [environment]::NewLine + 'c' | out-file "c:\temp\a.txt"

Answer 2

You will occasionally need to use a 'carriage return' in conjunction with newline to get a new line to appear. Try this:

"b`r`nc" | out-file "a.txt" 

For more information on carriage returns, you can read this on Stack Overflow.

Answer 3

If you open with Notepad++, you'll see the line break. Also, if you run

Get-Content a.txt

You'll see the line break there too.

Issue here is encoding. For this to work:

"b`nc" | out-file a.txt -Encoding ascii

That should open properly in notepad.