Re: echo redirect additional new line

[Greg Wooledge]

On Thu, Jul 23, 2015 at 03:41:13PM +0200, Hans Ginzel wrote:
> Hello!
> 
> Consider, please, this small script
> 
> echo 1
> echo 1>"a b"
> echo 2
> echo 2>"c\nd"

Did you intend to write the number "2" to a file, or did you intend to
redirect stderr?

> Why is there the additional new line between 2 and 3 or 3 and 4 
> respectively.

Because you are redirecting stderr instead of stdout.  echo is writing
to stdout, and it has no arguments, so stdout just gets a blank line.
You are redirecting stderr to a file named c\nd (that's four characters,
one of which is a literal backslash), but nothing is being written to
stderr, so the file is 0 bytes long.

I believe you probably wanted:

echo 2 >$'c\nd'

The space after the 2 is extremely significant, and $'...' is how you
create strings (filenames, etc.) with control characters in them.