A Practical Guide to Red Hat® Linux® 8

Four More Utilities

The echo and date utilities are two of the most frequently used from the large collection of GNU/Linux utilities. The script utility helps you record part of a session in a file, and mcopy makes a copy of a text file that can be read on an MS Windows machine.

echo: Displays Text

The echo utility copies anything you put on the command line after echo to the screen. Some examples are shown in Figure 3-8. The last example shows what the shell does with an unquoted asterisk (*) on the command line: expands it into a list of filenames in the directory.

Figure 3-8. echo copies the command line (but not the word echo) to the screen

$ ls memo memo.0714 practice $ echo Hi Hi $ echo This is a sentence. This is a sentence. $ echo star: ...