I'm trying to create a shell variable with newlines inside it, so that when I echo the variable and pipe it to, say, awk, it output with the newlines. Why is this so problematic? I frankly don't know, but BASH seems to be stripping my variable of newlines. Here's an example
$ cat script.sh
#!/bin/bash
list="hello " # first hello
list=$list`echo ""` # should then put a newline after hello
list=$list'
' # This should too
list=$list"world" # and world on the next row
echo $list # now see what happens...
$ ./script.sh
hello world
WHY DOES IT TAKE AWAY MY NEWLINES? I solved it by creating a temporary file, output everything there, and then read from the file, but I don't want to do that!
Does anyone know how to store newlines in a shell varabile? Thanks a bunch,
bash gives alot of help here. From the bash man page:
echo [-neE] [arg ...]
Output the args, separated by spaces, followed by a
newline. The return status is always 0. If -n is
specified, the trailing newline is suppressed. If the
-e option is given, interpretation of the following
backslash-escaped characters is enabled. The -E option
disables the interpretation of these escape characters,
even on systems where they are interpreted by default.
echo does not interpret -- to mean the end of options.
echo interprets the following escape sequences:
\a alert (bell)
\b backspace
\c suppress trailing newline
\e an escape character
\f form feed
\n new line
\r carriage return
\t horizontal tab
\v vertical tab
\\ backslash
\nnn the character whose ASCII code is the octal value
nnn (one to three digits)
\xnnn
the character whose ASCII code is the hexadecimal
value nnn (one to three digits)
