CODEWITHSUNDEEP
bash
Open the way
Open the way

Reputation: 27329

How to tell bash that the line continues on the next line

In a bash script I got from another programmer, some lines exceeded 80 columns in length. What is the character or thing to be added to the line in order to indicate that the line continues on the next line?

Upvotes: 194

Views: 260154

Answers (3)

chepner
chepner

Reputation: 531125

In general, you can use a backslash at the end of a line in order for the command to continue on to the next line. However, there are cases where commands are implicitly continued, namely when the line ends with a token than cannot legally terminate a command. In that case, the shell knows that more is coming, and the backslash can be omitted. Some examples:

# In general
$ echo "foo" \
> "bar"
foo bar

# Pipes
$ echo foo |
> cat
foo

# && and ||
$ echo foo &&
> echo bar
foo
bar
$ false ||
> echo bar
bar

Different, but related, is the implicit continuation inside quotes. In this case, without a backslash, you are simply adding a newline to the string.

$ x="foo
> bar"
$ echo "$x"
foo
bar

With a backslash, you are again splitting the logical line into multiple logical lines.

$ x="foo\
> bar"
$ echo "$x"
foobar

Upvotes: 84

Jingguo Yao
Jingguo Yao

Reputation: 7986

\ does the job. @Guillaume's answer and @George's comment clearly answer this question. Here I explains why The backslash has to be the very last character before the end of line character. Consider this command:

   mysql -uroot \
   -hlocalhost

If there is a space after \, the line continuation will not work. The reason is that \ removes the special meaning for the next character which is a space not the invisible line feed character. The line feed character is after the space not \ in this example.

Upvotes: 34

Guillaume
Guillaume

Reputation: 18865

The character is a backslash \

From the bash manual:

The backslash character ‘\’ may be used to remove any special meaning for the next character read and for line continuation.

Upvotes: 247

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