A shell prompt for input must leave the cursor on the same line as the text. Which bash command writes `Continue? ` with no trailing newline?
LPIC-1 Exam 101-500, objective 103. GNU and Unix commands easy
Machine-checked — no person has signed for it. This question was read against the source cited below by an automated pass, which found no contradiction. That is a weaker claim than it sounds: the same kind of process wrote the question, so it can confirm its own mistake.
Treat it as a good draft rather than as settled fact, and read the source below before you rely on it. It is not used in mock exams here — only questions a person has signed for are.
How these questions are written — where each question comes from, what the verification ledger records, and what happens when one is found wrong.
The options
Correct echo -n "Continue? "
Correct. -n suppresses the newline that echo normally appends, so the cursor stays after the space.
Not correct echo -e "Continue? "
Wrong. -e enables interpretation of backslash escapes in the argument. There are none here, and the trailing newline is still written.
Not correct echo -E "Continue? "
Wrong. -E disables backslash escape interpretation, which is already the default for the bash builtin. The newline is unaffected.
Not correct echo "Continue? \c"
Wrong as written. \c does suppress further output including the newline, but only when escape interpretation is enabled; without -e the bash builtin prints the two characters \c literally.
Why
The bash echo builtin takes -n to drop the trailing newline, -e to interpret escapes such as \n and \t, and -E to switch that interpretation off again. Behaviour differs between shells and between the builtin and /bin/echo, which is why printf, whose format string never gains an implicit newline, is the portable choice in scripts.
Where this comes from
- Cited
- manual page bash(1)
Practise this
Reading one question is not practice. The trainer will draw a short set from objective 103 and space the ones you get wrong.
More questions on this objective
- A user starts a new terminal window in a running graphical desktop session, which launches bash as an interactive shell that is NOT a login shell. Which file in the user's home directory does bash read in that case? machine-checked
- In bash, which history expansion re-runs the entire previous command line? machine-checked
- Which bash command prints the literal five characters $USER instead of the current user name? machine-checked
- You want /opt/bin searched for executables, after all the directories already in PATH, in the current bash session and in every command started from it. Which command does that? machine-checked
- There is a passwd manual page in section 1 (the command) and another in section 5 (the /etc/passwd file format). Which command opens the section 5 page? machine-checked
- Select the TWO true statements about shell variables and the environment in bash. machine-checked