Question

I have a file with several lines.
When using cat/more/less [file] in the shell,
the content is shown line by line

When doing the following commands:

temp=`cat [file]`
echo $temp

the content is shown in one line.

Is there a way to preserve the line endings when setting to environment variable and then echo it?

Thanks

Answer 1

Yes:

temp=`cat [file]`
echo "$temp"

The magic is in the quotes around $temp; without them, echo gets these arguments:

echo line1\nline2\nlin3

The shell parsing algorithm will split the command line at white space, so echo sees three arguments. If you quote the variable, echo will see a single argument and the shell parsing won’t touch the whitespace between the quotes.