Question

Using growlnotify how can I display multiple lines of text from the command line?

Slash-n – \n – like this doesn’t seem to work:

growlnotify -t title -m "messageline1\nmessage2"

I just get a message messageline1\nmessage2

Answer 1

The intended escaped newline is not interpreted as such by growl – it’s just treated as a literal slash, followed by an ‘en’.

You can get the shell to insert a newline in the string this way:

growlnotify -t title -m "messageline1"$'\n'"message2"

See (e.g.) Unix command sh:

Words of the form $’string’ are treated specially. The word expands to
string, with backslash-escaped characters replaced as specifed by the
ANSI C standard.