Question

How can I write some lines to a file in a bash script?

I want to write the following into a file ~/.inputrc

"\e[A": history-search-backward
"\e[B": history-search-forward
"\e[C": forward-char
"\e[D": backward-char

Currently I have this working but somewhat ugly method, and I’m sure there should be a better way.

#!/bin/sh
echo \"\\e[A\": history-search-backward > ~/.inputrc 
echo \"\\e[B\": history-search-forward >> ~/.inputrc
echo \"\\e[C\": forward-char >> ~/.inputrc
echo \"\\e[D\": backward-char >> ~/.inputrc

Answer 1

A slightly simpler method would be:

cat > ~/.inputrc << "EOF"
"\e[A": history-search-backward
"\e[B": history-search-forward
"\e[C": forward-char
"\e[D": backward-char
EOF

I’m curious why you need to do this though. If you want to setup a file with some specific text, then maybe you should create the skeleton file, and dump it into /etc/skel. Then, you can cp /etc/skel/.inputrc ~/.inputrc in your script.