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When I echo $something >> file.txt, a new line will be append to the file.

What if I want to append without a new line?

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Be careful doing echo $something, its behavior depends on the IFS variable, and you could end up with disappearing character. You can try the following: var="hello world"; echo $var (two spaces between hello and world) or var="hello world"; IFS='l'; echo $var or var="-e hello \\n world"; echo $var. To solve that, put double quotes around the variable like this: echo "$var", or use printf. – jfgagne Mar 1 '12 at 12:17

2 Answers

up vote 16 down vote accepted

That's what echo -n is for .

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up vote 6 down vote

printf is very flexible and more portable than echo. Like the C/Perl/etc implementations, if you do not terminate the format string with \n then no newline is printed:

printf "%s" "$something" >> file.txt
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