Question

#!/bin/bash
RESULT=$(ls)

echo -e "$RESULT"  # prints the result of 'ls' with new lines
echo -e $RESULT    # prints the result of 'ls' in one line

Why does the second approach print all in one line instead of a new line for each item ? Should’nt the -e option trigger the interpretation of the \n charachters ?

Answer 1

When you run this command:

echo -e $RESULT

Bash performs word splitting on $RESULT; that is, it splits it up by whitespace, and passes the resulting tokens as separate arguments to echo. So you’re essentially running this:

echo -e file1.txt file2.txt file3.txt

and echo has no way of knowing that $RESULT contained newlines.

(The -e, by the way, isn’t really relevant here. -e doesn’t affect the treatment of newline characters, only of an actual sequence like \n — a backslash followed by an n.)