CryEcho: Command line flags
CryEcho with no arguments will generate the following summary help information showing each of the command line flags it can take:
C:\>CryEcho
CryEcho - from www.cryer.co.uk 1.0 (build November 2011)
A console
application which displays a message to standard out.
Unlike "echo" it
does not automatically add a newline.
CryEcho [+n|-n] [-q]
message
Where:
-n echoes the message without a newline.
This is the default.
+n echoes the message with a newline at the
end.
-q ignores any double quotes.
The following character substitutions are
performed before echoing:
\a - Alert; buzzer beep on most PCs
\b -
Backspace
\n - Newline
\r - Carriage return
\s -
Space
\t - Tab
\" - Double quote
\\ - Single
back-slash
What these flags mean:
- -n
- Do not echo a carriage return at the end. This is the default behaviour of CryEcho, so it is unlikely that you would want to use this flag.
- +n
- Echo a carriage return at the end. The default behaviour of CryEcho is
not to include a newline after it has displayed the message, adding this
flag forces CryEcho to add a newline at the end. This makes its behaviour
almost the same as the in-build echo command.
So:
C:\>CryEcho +n message
produces the same output as:
C:\>CryEcho message\n
or the more traditional:
C:\>echo message
- -q
- Ignore (or remove) any double quotes. So any double quotes (except double quotes which are escaped) will not be echoed.
What the substitutions mean:
- \a
- Echo the alert character. This normally sounds the buzzer briefly.
- \b
- Backspace. This allows the previous character to be deleted.
So:
C:\>CryEcho 1\b2
will produce:
2
Actually it produces "1" followed by a backspaced followed by "2", which ends up as showing a "2". But if you were to pipe the output from CryEcho to a file then that file would capture all three characters.
- \n
- Newline.
So:
C:\>CryEcho 1\n2
will produce:
1
2 - \r
- Carriage return. A carriage return moves the print position (or the
position where the next character will be printed) to the start of the
current line.
So:
C:\>CryEcho 123\r45
will produce:
453
As the "45" has overprinted the start of "123".
- \s
- Space.
- \t
- Tab. A tab will advance to the next tab stop. Think of a tab stop as
being 8 characters wide, then a tab will advance to the beginning of the
next tab block.
This can be useful when aligning output visually.
So:
C:\>CryEcho one\ttwo\three\tfour
will produce:
one two
three four - \"
- A double quote. An escaped double quote will appear even if quotes are suppressed using the -q flag.
- \\
- A single slash. This allows you to echo a backslash ('\') without
fear that it might be interpreted as part of another substitution.
So:
C:\>CryEcho one\\two
will produce:
one\two
Had this been a single slash then it would instead have been interpreted as "one<tab>wo".
More Information
For more information please refer to one of the following pages: