bash - How to echo out things without a newline?

Question

I have the following code:

for x in "${array[@]}"
do
  echo "$x"
done

The results are something like this (I sort these later in some cases):

1
2
3
4
5

Is there a way to print it as 1 2 3 4 5 instead? Without adding a newline every time?

Answer 1

Yes. Use the -n option:

echo -n "$x"

From help echo:

-n do not append a newline

This would strips off the last newline too, so if you want you can add a final newline after the loop:

for ...; do ...; done; echo

---

Note:

This is not portable among various implementations of echo builtin/external executable. The portable way would be to use printf instead:

printf '%s' "$x"