How do I add a line break for read command?

Question

 read -p "Please Enter a Message:" message 

How can I add a line break after Message:?

Answer 1

Just looking for the exact same thing. You can use:

# -r and -e options are unrelated to the answer. read -rep $'Please Enter a Message:\n' message 

And it will work exactly as asked:

Please enter a Message: _ 

Here is an extract from the bash manpage explaining it:

Words of the form $'string' are treated specially. The word expands to string, with backslash-escaped characters replaced as specified by the ANSI C standard. Backslash escape sequences, if present, are decoded as follows:

• (...)
• \n new line
• (...)

The expanded result is single-quoted, as if the dollar sign had not been present.

Took me a while to find out.

Note that single quotes and double quotes behave differently in this regard:

A double-quoted string preceded by a dollar sign ($) will cause the string to be translated according to the current locale. If the cur- rent locale is C or POSIX, the dollar sign is ignored. If the string is translated and replaced, the replacement is double-quoted.

Answer 2

I like Huang F. Lei's answer, but if you don't like the literal line break, this works:

read -p "Please Enter a Message: `echo $'\n> '`" message 

Shows:

Please Enter a Message: > _

...where _ is where the cursor ends up. Note that since trailing newlines are usually dropped during command substitution, I've included the > afterward. But actually, your original question doesn't seem to want that prompt bit, so:

# Get a carriage return into `cr` -- there *has* to be a better way to do this cr=`echo $'\n.'` cr=${cr%.}  # Use it read -p "Please Enter a Message: $cr" message 

Shows

Please Enter a Message: _

There has to be a better way, though.