How to write to file from bash

[tonytiger]

Hi,
I need to append text to the end of file to the same line from shell.
This works almost:

[Tony@localhost ~]$ echo foo1 >> foo.txt
[Tony@localhost ~]$ echo foo2 >> foo.txt
[Tony@localhost ~]$ cat foo.txt
foo1
foo2
[Tony@localhost ~]$

However, I would like the result to be

[Tony@localhost ~]$ cat foo.txt
foo1foo2[Tony@localhost ~]$

I believe the difference is because it seems that ">>" makes a new line after writing the text to file.

How to do this? I'm sure it's very simple.

Thanks.

Tony

[erikd]

Use 'echo -n'.

[Hlingler]

Hello:

I'm curious about this, too. If I use the "echo -n" command, will any commands that follow be executed? For example, I have added the following to /etc/rc.local:

{ date; hdparm -S60 /dev/sda; hdparm -S60 /dev/sdb; hdparm -d 1 /dev/hda; } >> /var/log/hdparm.log

but each of the commands is logged on a separate line, with an extra line between. I would like to have them all logged on the same line. Would

echo -n `date; hdparm -S60 /dev/sda; hdparm -S60 /dev/sdb; hdparm -d 1 /dev/hda;` >> /var/log/hdparm.log

accomplish this? I.E., will these commands actually be executed, or just the output echoed to the log file?

Thanx,
Vince

[RupertPupkin]

You could use echo -n, as erikd suggested, though you will need to surround the text with quotes with a space at the end, otherwise you get "foo1foo2" instead of "foo1 foo2"

echo -n "foo1 " >> foo.txt
echo -n "foo2 " >> foo.txt

or you could pipe the text to tr to replace the newlines with spaces:

echo foo1 | tr '\n' ' ' >> foo.txt
echo foo2 | tr '\n' ' ' >> foo.txt

[tonytiger]

Thank you all. It worked.

Tony