Bash/Python: Does `echo` Command Insert A Newline When Acting As Input To Another Command?

I have a simple python script line_printer.py: import fileinput i = 1 for line in fileinput.input(): print 'Line', str(i), ':', line.strip() i+=1 I'm trying to understand

Solution 1:

This command will answer your question:

echo 'hi' | od -c

The reason for the trailing \n character is that stdout on a terminal by default uses line buffering - meaning it will only display output data that ends with the newline character.

Play around with the printf command:

printf "%s"  foo
printf "%s\n" anotherfoo

Solution 2:

If you look in the bash source, bash-4.2/builtins/echo.def you can see that the builtin echo command always (line 113) outputs a final \n (line 194) unless the -n was specified (line 198) or output of echo is used as a string (line 166). You can test this by doing

echo `echo "Ho ho ho"` | od -c

You will see only one \n because the output of echo "Ho ho ho" is evaluated as a string in the expression echo `echo "Ho ho ho"`.

It doesn't seem to have any relation to the terminal setup.