CODEWITHSUNDEEP
linuxbashshellnewline
Medya Gh
Medya Gh

Reputation: 5023

How to break a line (add a newline) in read -p in Bash?

How could I break a line using \n in read -p?

For example 

read -p "Please Enter the percent [30 between 100]\n The value is  Default = 80   :" scale_percent

I want \n to break a line but it doesn't work.

In echo I use -e and it breaks a line.

So I tried

read -ep

to break the line but it didn't break the line. How can I do that?

And could you also please give me a good manual for read -p on the Internet because I couldn't find a nice one without a confusing description.

Upvotes: 10

Views: 9625

Answers (2)

jbrock
jbrock

Reputation: 121

You can do the following to include variables in the prompt:

some_var='first line'
read -p "$some_var"$'\n'"second line " user_input
echo $user_input

(I wanted to make this a comment to Nelson's answer, but I could not have newlines for code readability.)

Upvotes: 2

Nelson Benítez León
Nelson Benítez León

Reputation: 50563

You can do it this way:

read -p $'Please Enter the percent [30 between 100]\x0a The value is  Default = 80   :' scale_percent

we use above syntax to insert hex values, we insert \x0a which is the hexadecimal value of the newline character (LF). You can use same syntax above with echo to produce new lines, eg:

echo $'One line\x0asecond line'

This is a feature of BASH 2, it is documented here, the $'' is used to translate all escape sequences inside it for its ascii transcription. So we could obtain the same result of example above, this way:

echo $'One line\nsecond line'

Upvotes: 10

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