How to Format grep Output When Saving to a Variable

Question

If I grep our syslogs for a specific term, I get a nice output of those logs matching my term and each entry on a separate line.

If I save that to a variable so I can use it in a script as such:

results=$( grep "term" logs )
echo $results

then all the logs run together and are not human readable.

How can I make it look cleaner so when I do echo $results, I can actually read the output?

Thanks,

Answer 1

Quote it:

echo "$results"

This preserves all the whitespace, instead of using it for word splitting.

In general, you should almost always quote variables, unless you have a specific reason not to.