Echo newline to powershell console

Question

Is it possible to write a newline to the console in powershell?

I tried echo \"\\n\" but it is not translated to a new line, it just outputs \\n

Answer 1

echo is used in PowerShell all the time. It is an alias for write-output.

The issue here is that you need to be using the PowerShell escape character which is a backtick. You can read more about this on TechNet on about_escape_characters.

The following special characters are recognized by Windows PowerShell:

`0    Null
`a    Alert
`b    Backspace
`f    Form feed
`n    New line
`r    Carriage return
`t    Horizontal tab
`v    Vertical tab

So, if you are just trying to break up the output, you can simply use:

echo "`n"

That will actually output two new lines as all strings sent to Write-Output (see Get-Alias echo) will be terminated with a new line regardless. Since strings are evaluated as expressions in PowerShell "" would also work but it would only output the one line.

Also, since this data is being sent to the standard output stream, it will be captured by variables and pipelines. Write-Host might be a better option if that is something you want to mitigate.