How do I preserve newlines in a quoted string in Bash?
BashBash Problem Overview
I'm creating a script to automate the creation of apache virtual hosts. Part of my script goes like this:
MYSTRING="<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName $NEWVHOST
DocumentRoot /var/www/hosts/$NEWVHOST
...
"
echo $MYSTRING
However, the line breaks in the script are being ignored. If I echo the string, is gets spat out as one line.
How can I ensure that the line breaks are printed?
Bash Solutions
Solution 1 - Bash
Add quotes to make it work:
echo "$MYSTRING"
Look at it this way:
MYSTRING="line-1
line-2
line3"
echo $MYSTRING
this will be executed as:
echo line-1 \
line-2 \
line-3
i.e. echo
with three parameters, printing each parameter with a space in between them.
If you add quotes around $MYSTRING
, the resulting command will be:
echo "line-1
line-2
line-3"
i.e. echo
with a single string parameter which has three lines of text and two line breaks.