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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.

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1 Answer 1

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III. SHELL PROGRAMMING QUESTIONS

[...]

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

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    Note that ksh's print predates the printf command.
    – Stéphane Chazelas
    Nov 21, 2016 at 14:19
  • So basically what you're saying is they're the same?
    – trudgemank
    Nov 21, 2016 at 18:24
  • For the korn shell
    – trudgemank
    Nov 21, 2016 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, 2016 at 18:30

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