Question

I have a shell script that I am executing in Cygwin (maybe this is the problem). For this bit of code, I simply want to write the first line, and append a line break:

echo "`date` User `whoami` started the script." >> output.log
echo >> output.log

But the output.log file never seems to take the break. If I run the script multiple times, it’s as if the second echo doesn’t write to the file.

I’ve also tried:

echo -e "`date` User `whoami` started the script.\n" >> output.log

It yields the same results.

The odd thing is if I just enter the second echo statement above on the command line, without appending to the file, it gives me the expected output with the trailing line break.

Answer 1

I’m betting the problem is that Cygwin is writing Unix line endings (LF) to the file, and you’re opening it with a program that expects Windows line-endings (CRLF). To determine if this is the case — and for a bit of a hackish workaround — try:

echo "`date` User `whoami` started the script."$'\r' >> output.log

(where the $'\r' at the end is an extra carriage-return; it, plus the Unix line ending, will result in a Windows line ending).