Question

Why does echo-ing a carriage return from OSX Terminal behave differently than from a bash script?

From Terminal in OSX 10.7.3:

$ echo $SHELL
/bin/bash

$ /bin/bash --version
GNU bash, version 3.2.48(1)-release (x86_64-apple-darwin11)
Copyright (C) 2007 Free Software Foundation, Inc.

$ echo -ne "hello\rbye"
byelo

But I see a different result from test.sh:

#!/bin/bash
echo -ne "hello\rbye"

…running test.sh gives me:

$ ./test.sh
byehello

I was expecting byelo. Why is it different? and how do I correct this?

Answer 1

It had something to do with #!/bin/sh at the top of my script. After I changed it to #!/bin/bash, I saw the expected output.