Programming►Shell
Programming

How to print multiple line string on bash

To display some pre-formatted text onto screen, we need the following 2 capabilities:

Construct Multiple Text

There are 2 ways to construct multiple line strings:

  • String literal

    String Literal
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    text = "
    First Line
    Second Line
    Third Line
    "

  • Use cat

    cat
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    text = $(cat << EOF
    First Line
    Second Line
    Third Line
    EOF
    )

Print Multiple Text to Screen

For some reason, echo command will eat all the line break in the text, so we should use printf instead of echo.
And printf supports back-slash-escape, so we can use \n to print a new-line on screen.