Bash and fun with escape characters

Whilst writing the world's simplest Bash script to: -

• delete a pod
• deploy a new pod
• list the running pods
• describe the newly deployed pod

I wanted to add newline characters into my echo statements, to make things more readable.

I've written before about echo -e so was just double-checking my understanding via the command-line ...

I entered: -

echo -e "Hello World!\n"

but, instead of a friendly greeting, I saw: -

-bash: !\n: event not found

Wait, what now ?

Yeah, of course, I've entered a magical place escape sequence of: -

pling slash n

which, obviously, isn't what I meant to do ....

Easy solution - stick in a space character ...

echo -e "Hello World! \n"

Hello World! 

So here's the finished script: -

#!/bin/bash

clear

echo -e "Deleting existing busybox-kata pod\n"

kubectl delete pod busybox-kata

echo -e "\nDeploying new busybox-kata pod\n"

kubectl apply -f busybox-kata.yaml 

echo -e "\nSleeping ...\n"

sleep 10

echo -e "\nChecking pods ...\n"

kubectl get pods

echo -e "\nSleeping ...\n"

sleep 5

echo -e "\nDescribing busybox-kata pod to see all is good ...\n"

kubectl describe pod busybox-kata | tail -8