Question

So it seems read command only takes 1 line, what if I wanted to input a short paragraph with line breaks? What would I use? I think there’s a command that ends when you press ctrl+d, so it return key is used for starting a new paragraph.

Answer 1

text=$(cat)

Allows you to type text with newlines, terminated by a Ctrl-d at the beginning of a line.

The equivalent in Bash, without needing to use an external utility is

text=$(</dev/stdin)