What is the Bash Escape Character "\c"?

bash unix escaping echo
Keith Pinson picture Keith Pinson · Aug 23, 2011 · Viewed 25.3k times · Source

What is the name and function of the \c escape character in Bash? What is its numeric value? I have seen that \cx is a control character, but what about plain \c? It seems that:

echo -e "Hello World\c"

and

echo -en "Hello World"

are equivalent. However, Python doesn't use it as an escape character, and it is missing from all of the lists of escape characters I found. Is this a Bash-specific behavior?

Answer

paxdiablo picture paxdiablo · Aug 23, 2011

That's actually specific to some versions of echo (I'm pretty sure that \c came from SysV while the -n version was a BSD-ism).

It simply means don't output the trailing newline.

Related questions

Which characters need to be escaped when using Bash?

Is there any comprehensive list of characters that need to be escaped in Bash? Can it be checked just with sed? In particular, I was checking whether % needs to be escaped or not. I tried echo "h%h" | sed 's/%/…

Read More
escaping newlines in sed replacement string

Here are my attempts to replace a b character with a newline using sed while running bash $> echo 'abc' | sed 's/b/\n/' anc no, that's not it $> echo 'abc' | sed 's/b/\\n/' a\nc …

Read More
bash script - unable to set variable with double quotes in value

Need help in fixing this bash script to set a variable with a value including double quotes. Somehow I am defining this incorrectly as my values foo and bar are not enclosed in double quotes as needed. My script thus …

Read More