echo removes leading whitespace in a Bash variable

Question

Newbie to bash here. I'm hoping to prepend a single whitespace to a variable in bash, currently I have the following, which doesn't seem to work:

space=`printf '%1s' ' '`
mystr='hello'

mystr="$space$mystr"
echo $mystr

So instead of printing out "hello", I would like the result to be " hello", which has an additional whitespace at the beginning. What's the correct way to do this? Thanks.

This is also [BashPitfalls #14](http://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashPitfalls#echo_.24foo). — Charles Duffy, Jul 14 '17 at 00:38

codeforester · Accepted Answer · 2017-07-13T18:27:38.960

12

The leading space is being removed by shell because of word splitting. Enclose your variable in double quotes to disable word splitting:

echo "$mystr"

See this post: I just assigned a variable, but echo $variable shows something else

See these docs as well: Word Splitting and Field Splitting

edited Jul 13 '17 at 18:27

answered Jul 13 '17 at 18:17

codeforester

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echo removes leading whitespace in a Bash variable

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