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bashubuntuechoquotestruncate

text is shortened in variable

I created the following file called birthday, which contains the following strings:

Happy Birthday
Happy Birthday
Happy Birthday

when I use the command cat birthday the shell will output the text string with the line spacing

Happy Birthday
Happy Birthday
Happy Birthday

when I try to declare a variable like this - and echo it back everything is truncated on a single string. How do I keep the spacing and pass it to a variable:

birthday=$(cat birthday)  && echo $birthday

Output:

happy birthday happy birthday happy birthday
Solution

  • Without quotes, the shell expands the variable and performs word splitting. Thus, it sends 6 parameters to echo, which prints them all separated by spaces.

    Use double quotes to prevent word splitting.

    echo "$birthday"

    BTW, "truncating" usually describes shortening data by removing bytes at the end, not at random positions inside the data.