How to split strings over multiple lines in Bash?
This is what you may want
$ echo "continuation"\> "lines"continuation lines
If this creates two arguments to echo and you only want one, then let's look at string concatenation. In bash, placing two strings next to each other concatenate:
$ echo "continuation""lines"continuationlines
So a continuation line without an indent is one way to break up a string:
$ echo "continuation"\> "lines"continuationlines
But when an indent is used:
$ echo "continuation"\> "lines"continuation lines
You get two arguments because this is no longer a concatenation.
If you would like a single string which crosses lines, while indenting but not getting all those spaces, one approach you can try is to ditch the continuation line and use variables:
$ a="continuation"$ b="lines"$ echo $a$bcontinuationlines
This will allow you to have cleanly indented code at the expense of additional variables. If you make the variables local it should not be too bad.
Here documents with the <<-HERE
terminator work well for indented multi-line text strings. It will remove any leading tabs from the here document. (Line terminators will still remain, though.)
cat <<-____HERE continuation lines____HERE
See also http://ss64.com/bash/syntax-here.html
If you need to preserve some, but not all, leading whitespace, you might use something like
sed 's/^ //' <<____HERE This has four leading spaces. Two of them will be removed by sed.____HERE
or maybe use tr
to get rid of newlines:
tr -d '\012' <<-____ continuation lines____
(The second line has a tab and a space up front; the tab will be removed by the dash operator before the heredoc terminator, whereas the space will be preserved.)
For wrapping long complex strings over many lines, I like printf
:
printf '%s' \ "This will all be printed on a " \ "single line (because the format string " \ "doesn't specify any newline)"
It also works well in contexts where you want to embed nontrivial pieces of shell script in another language where the host language's syntax won't let you use a here document, such as in a Makefile
or Dockerfile
.
printf '%s\n' >./myscript \ '#!/bin/sh` \ "echo \"G'day, World\"" \ 'date +%F\ %T' && \chmod a+x ./myscript && \./myscript
You can use bash arrays
$ str_array=("continuation" "lines")
then
$ echo "${str_array[*]}"continuation lines
there is an extra space, because (after bash manual):
If the word is double-quoted,
${name[*]}
expands to a single word with the value of each array member separated by the first character of the IFS variable
So set IFS=''
to get rid of extra space
$ IFS=''$ echo "${str_array[*]}"continuationlines