How do I write non-ASCII characters using echo?

Question

How do I write non-ASCII characters using echo? Is there an escape sequence, such as \012 or something like that?

I want to append ASCII characters to a file using:

echo ?? >> file

Answer 1

Use

echo -e "\012"

Answer 2

If you care about portability, you'll drop echo and use printf(1):

printf '\012'

Answer 3

On my terminal,

printf '\012' >>output.txt

works for both the octal representation of the ascii character, and the corresponding hexadecimal:

printf '\xA' >>output.txt

The command

echo -en '\012' >>output.txt

however, does not function properly. Only hexadecimals seem to work with echo -e. The -n removes the default extra newline from echo.

Answer 4

I took non-ASCII to mean Unicode, at least in my case, but printf "\x##" wasn't enough for my 2-byte solution, so I used this slightly different syntax instead:

> printf "\u25ba"
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