Question

I’m using GNU bash, version 3.00.15(1)-release (x86_64-redhat-linux-gnu). And this command:

echo '-e'  

doesn’t print anything. I guess this is because ‘-e’ is one of a valid options of echo command because echo ‘-n’ and echo ‘-E’ (the other two options) also produce empty strings.

The question is how to escape the sequence ‘-e’ for echo to get the natural output (‘-e’).

Answer 1

This is a tough one 😉

Usually you would use double dashes to tell the command that it should stop interpreting options, but echo will only output those:

$ echo -- -e -- -e 

You can use -e itself to get around the problem:

$ echo -e '\055e' -e 

Also, as others have pointed out, if you don’t insist on using the bash builtin echo, your /bin/echo binary might be the GNU version of the tool (check the man page) and thus understand the POSIXLY_CORRECT environment variable:

$ POSIXLY_CORRECT=1 /bin/echo -e -e