How it works...

While this is a pretty important topic revolving around data types (especially when dealing with math or calculations), we broke the solution to this recipe up into two parts:

1. In step 1, echo is pretty straightforward. We have mentioned in the past that there are special characters and escapes. \t stands for tab \r\n a new line in Windows (although in Linux, \n\n would have sufficed) and again, we could print out a fancy UTF character:

$ bash echo-mayhem.sh
Currently we have seen the command "echo" used before in the previous script

Can we also have \t tabs? \r\n\r\n? NO, not yet!

Can we also have tabs?

? YES, we can now! enable interpretation of backslash escapes
We can also have:

Check the man pages for more info ;)

2. However, the results of step 2 are a bit different, as we can see in the following code. Let's explore this a bit more as it looks like it's a bit more than sloppy alignment:

$ bash printf-mayhem.sh 
This is the same as echo -e with a new line (\n)
This is two decimal places: 10.00

shall we align: 

 3.333 6.666600
   3.333333 6.666600
 3.333333 6.666600
--------------------
Char Hex
N 0x4E
o 0x6F
  0x20
p 0x70
l 0x6C
a 0x61
c 0x63
e 0x65
  0x20
l 0x6C
i 0x69
k 0x6B
e 0x65
  0x20
h 0x68
o 0x6F
m 0x6D
e 0x65
! 0x21
  0x0 

3. As we can see, in the preceding step after execution, there are a few interesting things. The first thing we notice is that printf is echo on steroids; it provides the same functionality and far more such as alignment, strings being printed with %s, and decimal places (for example, %.2f). As we dig deeper, we can see that we can limit the number of decimal places using a % after the %tag. Notice the single character usually immediately after the % sign—this is how you format the following parameters. Using a value like %10f, we are dedicating 10 spaces to the value, or rather, the width of 10 characters. If we use %-10, then it means we are aligning the value to the left. And besides the near horizontal rule, which uses expansion, we also "stepped" our way through the string "No place like home!". Using a while loop, we print out each ASCII character using (%-c) with its corresponding hexadecimal value (%-2X).