Print new line as string literal in unix or shell

Question

Hi I have a shell script that has

variable="apple banana monkey"

I want it to be

apple\nbanana\nmonkey

But when I try and execute

echo $variable | tr ' ' '\n'

It results to

apple
banana
monkey

I want to get the actual literal of new line and not the evaluated value.

I have tried echo -e or echo -n or even put numerous escapes \\ but to no avail.

Please help. Thanks

Does this answer your question? [Replacing newline escape '\n' with an escaped newline escape '\\n' using sed](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/30785650/replacing-newline-escape-n-with-an-escaped-newline-escape-n-using-sed) — Mickael B., Jan 24 '20 at 09:27

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Jan 24 '20 at 09:26

0

tr command translates chars into chars by performing a 1 to 1 mapping. You are asking the tool to translate a space into two chars, which is something that cannot be done with tr.

If you accept a command switch, you can try with sed:

echo "$variable" | sed  's/ /\\n/g'

answered Jan 24 '20 at 09:26

Poshi

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Thanks, this does not work in our environment. Still evaluates the new lines. – Paolo Lambojon Jan 24 '20 at 09:34
It doesn't work because it replace the space with a `\n`. You need one more backslash `'s/ /\\\n/g'` should work. – Mickael B. Jan 24 '20 at 10:34

Print new line as string literal in unix or shell

1 Answers1