How would you include newlines in a C-shell echo command?
It sounds ridiculously easy, and it is with other sinks. But I can't figure out how to get the echo to display new lines. For example -
cat myFile
shows the file as it really is, what I want -
this
is
my
file
whereas my script which contains the following -
#!/bin/csh
set var = `cat myFile`
echo "$var"
deletes all new lines, which is not what I want -
this is my file
Thanks in advance.
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The problem is not the command echo
, but the csh handling. When you do
set var = `cat myFile`
newlines from are myfile
never saved to $var
; they are converted to spaces. I can't think of a way to get the csh variable to include newlines read from the file, although there might be a way to do it.
sh and its derivatives behave the way you want. For example:
$ x="`printf 'foo\nbar'`"
$ echo $x
foo bar
$ echo "$x"
foo
bar
$
Double quotes in the assignment force newlines to be stored (except the last one). echo $x
replaces newlines with spaces, but echo "$x"
preserves them.
Your best bet is to do something other than trying to store the contents of the file in a variable. You said in a comment that you are trying to send an email with the contents of a log file. So download the contents of the file directly to whatever mail command you use. I don't have all the details, but it might look something like this:
( echo this ; echo that ; echo the-other ; cat myFile ) | some-mail-command
Mandatory link: http://www.faqs.org/faqs/unix-faq/shell/csh-whynot/
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You can use Awk to delimit each line with "\ n" before the shell concatenates them.
set var = `cat myfile | awk '{printf("%s\\n", $0)'}`
Assuming your echo command interprets "\ n" as a newline, echo ${var}
should play it cat myfile
without the need for additional file access. If the newline code is not recognized, you can try adding the -e flag to echo and / or use / bin / echo.
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