A compact and cost-effective photonic approach for generating switchable multi-format linearly chirped signals is proposed and experimentally demonstrated. The core component is a dual-drive Mach–Zehnder modulator driven by a coding sequence and a linearly chirped waveform. By properly setting the amplitudes of the coding sequence, a linearly chirped signal with different formats, including the frequency shift keying (FSK), phase shift keying (PSK), dual-band PSK, and FSK/PSK modulation formats, can be generated. Experiments are conducted to verify the feasibility of the proposed scheme. Linearly chirped signals with the above four formats are successfully generated. The scheme features multiple formats and high tunability based on a compact structure, which has potential applications in modern multifunctional systems.