How to specify a multi-line shell variable

Question

I have written a query   function print ui hosts   local sql    select            print sql    sql      local sql - a very long string  Query is not formatted  How can I split a string into multiple lines

User · Answer

read does not export the variable  which is a good thing most of the time   Here s an alternative which can be exported in one command  can preserve or discard linefeeds  and allows mixing of quoting-styles as needed  Works for bash and zsh   oneLine   printf  s       a           b              tc t            d          multiLine   printf   s n        a           b              tc t            d            I admit the need for quoting makes this ugly for SQL  but it answers the  more generally expressed  question in the title   I use it like this  export LS COLORS   printf  s             rc 36   ini 36   inf 36   cfg 36    33   bak 33    33                    bd 40 33 1 cd 40 33 1 or 1 31 mi 31 ex 00     in a file sourced from both my  bashrc and  zshrc

User · Answer

simply insert new line where necessary  sql   SELECT c1  c2 from Table1  Table2 where         shell will be looking for the closing quotation mark

User · Answer

Thanks to dimo414 s answer to a similar question  this shows how his great solution works  and shows that you can have quotes and variables in the text easily as well   example output      test sh  The text from the example function is    Welcome dev  Would you  like  to know how many  files  there are in  tmp     There are        38  files in  tmp  according to the  wc  command   test sh     bin bash  function text1       COUNT    ls  tmp   wc -l  cat  lt  lt EOF     1 Would you  like  to know how many  files  there are in  tmp     There are   COUNT  files in  tmp  according to the  wc  command  EOF    function main       OUT   text1  Welcome dev      echo  The text from the example function is   OUT     main

User · Answer

Use read with a heredoc as shown below   read -d    sql  lt  lt  EOF select c1  c2 from foo where c1  something  EOF  echo   sql

User · Answer

I would like to give one additional answer  while the other ones will suffice in most cases   I wanted to write a string over multiple lines  but its contents needed to be single-line   sql                           SELECT c1  c2                 from Table1    TABLE2         where                             I am sorry if this if a bit off-topic  I did not need this for SQL   However  this post comes up among the first results when searching for multi-line shell variables and an additional answer seemed appropriate

[bash] How to specify a multi-line shell variable?

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