Question

I am using a bash script where I must store the last n-2 lines of a file in a variable.
The command I use for this is

last_n2_lines=`tail -n+3 $file`

Now whenever i echo the $last_n2_lines variable, I get all the lines of my file in a single line. How can I get the same formatting as I had in my original file. I tried printf but it just prints the first field.

Answer 1

Try this:

echo "$last_n2_lines"

echo doesn’t see the original value in your variant, because it’s broken down to argv array.