how to keep newline characters in command execution result?

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

I found that when I used a variable to receive the result from a command execution, the newline characters were removed from the variable.

For example, I ran

$ ret=`ls -l`
$ echo $ret

Then, I saw:
total 40 -rw-r--r-- 1 testtrunk testtrunk 0 Dec 13 11:13 pk -rw-rw-r-- 1 testtrunk testtrunk 0 Dec 13 11:13 pk1

But the output I expected is:
total 40
-rw-r--r-- 1 testtrunk testtrunk 0 Dec 13 11:13 pk
-rw-rw-r-- 1 testtrunk testtrunk 0 Dec 13 11:13 pk1

So, the question is, how to keep the newline characters in the variable that receives the command result?

Thanks.

2

Hi.

Use double-quotes around the variable in the echo ... cheers, drl

3

drl, thanks!