Echo (command)

echo
The echo command on Unix
Original author(s)	Douglas McIlroy (AT&T Bell Laboratories)
Developer(s)	Various open-source and commercial developers
Operating system	Multics, Unix, Unix-like, V, Plan 9, Inferno, FLEX, TRIPOS, AmigaDOS, Z80-RIO, OS-9, DOS, MSX-DOS, Panos, FlexOS, SISNE plus, OS/2, Windows, ReactOS, MPE/iX, KolibriOS, SymbOS
Platform	Cross-platform
Type	Command

echo is shell command that writes input text to standard output. It is available in many operating system and shells. It is often used in a shell script to log status, provide feedback to the user and for debugging. For an interactive session, output by default displays on the terminal screen, but output can be re-directed to a file or piped to another process.^[1]

Many shells implement echo as a builtin command rather than an external application as are many other commands.

Multiple, incompatible implementations of echo exist in different shells. Some expand escape sequences by default; some do not; some accept options; some do not. The POSIX specification^[2] leaves the behavior unspecified if the first argument is -n or any argument contains backslash characters while the Unix specification (XSI option in POSIX) mandates the expansion of some sequences and does not allow any option processing. In practice, many echo implementations are not compliant in the default environment. Because of these variations, echo is considered a non-portable command^[3] and the printf command (introduced in Ninth Edition Unix) is preferred instead.