On 7 December 2010 21:03, Richard Parsons richard.lee.parsons@gmail.com wrote:

If I do:

echo "1 2 3" > test

and then cat test, then I can see the contents of the file, including the new lines.

This is because you have literally written "1{ENTER}2{ENTER}3" in the terminal. Echo'ing this out to the file "test" will save the ASCII string you have written (new line characters are ASCII characters). If you use hexdump you can see this (I'm on my Mac but I believe its a fairly standard command);

james$ hexdump ./test 0000000 31 0a 32 0a 33 0a 0000006

Here we see the decimal for 1,2 and 3 in hex, 31, 32 and 33 respectively. Each is separated by '0a' which is the decimal value 10 written in hex. 10 is the ASCII character for a new line feed, NL). So cat'ing the file we have '1{NL}2{NL}3'. So far so good.

However, if I do:

VARIABLE=$(cat test) echo $VARIABLE

then the output has spaces instead of new lines.  Why is that?

Surround your variable in quote marks " to echo new lines;

james$ ./myscript 1 2 3 james$ cat ./myscript mine=$(cat test) echo "$mine"

And how could I stop that from happening?

What do you mean, how can you stop displaying spaces and display new lines instead? As above, use quote marks. Or do you mean something else?

HTH.