Question

Trying to figure out how to write a command across multiple lines because the real one is way to long for a prompt (4200 chars), so I tried this example:

Made a test file that contained the following 3 lines:

some thing
some
thing

When I do this grep:
grep "some thing" test

I get the expected result of:
some thing

But when I do this grep:
grep "some \
thing" test

I get the unexpected result of:
some thing
thing

Almost as if it ran the grep twice, once for “some ” and once for “thing”. Is there any way to properly use the \ to combine the 2 to where the result is like the first grep?

Answer 1

So it looks like this did it:
grep "some \
|thing" test.txt

Produced: some thing

Same as: grep "some thing" test.txt