Ttdfjt

The output from an executable (cURL) contains n. How can such output be displayed with line breaks?

Say the output from an executable is tCLn1523 memon, piping to printf does not show line breaks.

$ echo "tCLn1523 memon"
tCLn1523 memon
$
$ printf "tCLn1523 memon"
tCL
1523 memo
$
$ echo "tCLn1523 memon" | xargs -0 printf '%s'
tCLn1523 memon
$
$ echo "tCLn1523 memon" | awk ' printf "%s", $0 
tCLn1523 memon

%s does not interpret escape sequences. You need %b for that:

% echo 'tCLn1523 memon' | xargs -0 printf "%b"
tCL
1523 memo

%

You probably need to transform double-backslash to backslash as well, otherwise the input format would be ambiguous.

You can write a sed script to translate backslash-letter escapes. This script only translates the escape sequences that it recognizes and otherwise removes the backslash. I've put in support for newline and tab.

… | sed 's/\n/n/g; s/\t/ /; s/\(.)/1/g'

The whitespace in s/\t/ / is a tab character. GNU sed lets you write s/\t/t/.

If you also want octal escapes, use a more advanced tool such as Perl. You can make it parse all the escape sequences that it supports.

… | perl -pe 's/\([0-7]1,3|c.|[oxN][^]+|.)/""\$1""/eeg'

Here's what it'd take to do what you want with awk. Given this input:

$ printf '%sn' 'abc\ndefnghi'
abc\ndefnghi

Note that the first n is itself escaped and so should be treated literally as \n. Here's how to get the expected output:

$ printf '%sn' 'abc\ndefnghi' |
 awk 'gsub(/@/,"@A"); gsub(/\\/,"@B"); gsub(/\n/,"n"); gsub(/@B/,"\\"); gsub(/@A/,"@")1'
abc\ndef
ghi

If you want other escape sequences interpreted too, e.g. t, you'd add a separate gsub() for each of those right after the one for n, e.g.:

awk '
 gsub(/@/,"@A"); gsub(/\\/,"@B")
 gsub(/\n/,"n")
 gsub(/\t/,"t")
 gsub(/@B/,"\\"); gsub(/@A/,"@")
1'

Those first 2 and last 2 gsub()s are creating a unique string @B, mapping \ pairs to it to get them out of the way, and then mapping them back after the intended conversions are done.

Easy enough: echo -e "tCLn1523 memon"

From man echo:

-e enable interpretation of backslash escapes