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

Question

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

User · Accepted Answer

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

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

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     gt   bar  foo bar    Pipes   echo foo    gt  cat foo     amp  amp  and      echo foo  amp  amp   gt  echo bar foo bar   false     gt  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  gt  bar    echo   x  foo bar   With a backslash  you are again splitting the logical line into multiple logical lines     x  foo   gt  bar    echo   x  foobar

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

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