can anyone explain me what is the difference between echo and print in shell programming?
both echo and print are common in working ...
both displays the chars on the screen or windows.
upto me using print we can redirect the output to any file descriptor
using print -u[n] but for echo we have to redirect using redirection operator
or using pipe.
Print - You can format the output
Echo - displys the output as such and it is comparitively faster than print.
With ksh at least both echo and print are very fast built-in commands. Dave Korn added print to ksh. At the time ksh was developed Unix was split into a BSD and USG. And the echo statement was different. On BSD, "echo -n" would display no output but on USG it would display "-n". On USG, "echo \\c would display no output, but on BSD it would display "\c". So a portable shell script needed to capture and test the output from "echo -n" and then you could do:
if [ $ECHOTYPE = BSD ] ; then echo -n "enter name - " ; else echo "enter name - \\c" ; fi
Dave felt that rather than trying to solve the echo dichotomy, he would leave "echo" alone and go with "print" which was his own creation. "print" would be the same everywhere. And he added a lot of new stuff to "print".
Later, Posix decreed that the USG echo was standard. And it defined "printf" as a new, more powerful tool. So while Posix encourages the use of "printf", "echo" is now standard too. "print", on the other hand, is a non-standard feature of ksh.