Difference between echo and print in the Korn shell

Question

In Ksh, echo hello world and print hello world will return the same output (hello world). What is the difference between these text processing commands with respect to the Korn Shell?

I know how they work in BaSH, Cshell, and tcsh.

see also: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/65803/why-is-printf-better-than-echo — Sundeep, Nov 21 '16 at 13:20

score 6 · Accepted Answer · edited Nov 21 '16 at 13:37

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III. SHELL PROGRAMMING QUESTIONS

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Q12. Why does [ksh] have print since echo already exists [and] is widely used?

A12. The behavior of echo varies from system to system. The POSIX standard does not define the behavior of echo when the first argument beings with a - or when any argument contains a \ character. This makes echo pretty useless for use in portable scripts.

http://kornshell.com/doc/faq.html

edited Nov 21 '16 at 13:37

Stéphane Chazelas

544,893

answered Nov 21 '16 at 13:01

Ipor Sircer

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Note that ksh's print predates the printf command. – Stéphane Chazelas Nov 21 '16 at 14:19
So basically what you're saying is they're the same? – trudgemank Nov 21 '16 at 18:24
For the korn shell – trudgemank Nov 21 '16 at 18:24
and by that logic (no portability) isn't print useless too? :/ It's use with tcsh csh and bash is completely different than with ksh which more resembles PRINT in BASIC than UNIX imo. – trudgemank Nov 21 '16 at 18:30

Difference between echo and print in the Korn shell

1 Answers1

III. SHELL PROGRAMMING QUESTIONS