First, there are two flavors of the echo utility. The BSD-based version of echo concatenates all of the operands it is given and write them to standard output followed by a <newline>. If the -n option is present it doesn't output the <newline>. I assume this is the version of echo you have on your system. (On the UNIX System V-based version of echo -n is not an option; it is just another operand to be printed. But there are several escape sequences in the string operands that the System V echo will translate ("\t" -> <tab>, "\n" -> <newline>, "\0" -> skip the remainder of this and any following operand and skip the normal trailing <newline>, etc.) that the BSD echo will not change.) If you want to output some text without the normal trailing <newline> in a way that will be portable to all UNIX and Linux systems, use the printf utility instead of echo.

So, your cout << "string" being roughly equivalent to [icode]echo -n "string" is pretty close. But echo $1 is also an output statement; not an input statement. I'm more of a C guy, than C++. In C it is roughly equivalent to printf("%s\n", argv[1]);. The equivalence is would be exact if you used "$1" instead of $1 because if the string isn't quoted and you have the default setting for $IFS, any sequences of one or more <space> and <tab> characters will be translated to a single space and passed to the echo command as individual operands instead of as a single string.

In the shells (bash, ksh, sh, ...), $n (1 <= n <= 9) refers to the 9th argument given to to the shell script when it was invoked. If you use ${n}, n can be greater than 9. $0 refers to the name of the script (like argv[0] in a C or C++ program). So, if you have a regular file with the execute bit set named "script" that contains something like:

Code:

#!/bin/ksh
echo -n "There once was a "
echo $1
echo -n "that "
echo $2
echo -n "who liked to " 
echo $3
echo -n "There once was a " $1 " that " $2 " who liked to " $3

and invoked it as:

Code:

script man "spent a lot of time in a swimming pool" "win gold medals!"

the output should be something like:

Code:

There once was a man
 that spent a lot of time in a swimming pool
 who liked to win gold medals!
There once was a man that spent a lot of time in a swimming pool who liked to win gold medals!