text is shortened in variable

Question

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

use quotes: https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/bash.html#Word-Splitting — jhnc, Aug 12 '20 at 20:47

choroba · Accepted Answer · 2020-08-12T20:50:44.243

0

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.

edited Aug 12 '20 at 20:50

answered Aug 12 '20 at 20:45

choroba

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text is shortened in variable

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