How do you echo a 4-digit Unicode character in Bash?

% echo -e '\u2620'     # \u takes four hexadecimal digits
☠
% echo -e '\U0001f602' # \U takes eight hexadecimal digits
😂

This works in Zsh (I've checked version 4.3) and in Bash 4.2 or newer.

In UTF-8 it's actually 6 digits (or 3 bytes).

$ printf '\xE2\x98\xA0'
☠

To check how it's encoded by the console, use hexdump:

$ printf ☠ | hexdump
0000000 98e2 00a0                              
0000003