No line breaks with "cat"

Question

This code should read from wget2.html and output the links found. But it gives me output without line breaks. How can I force cat to add line breaks?

chksitename=$(cat wget2.html | grep -e "$sitename" | sed -e "s/^.*\("$sitename".*jpg\).*$/\1/g" | sort | uniq)
echo $chksitename

[UUoC](http://partmaps.org/era/unix/award.html#cat), but what are you actually trying to achieve? — johnsyweb, Dec 18 '11 at 10:50
BTW, don't do `cat myfile | grep pattern`. Do `grep pattern myfile` instead. — Michał Šrajer, Dec 18 '11 at 21:24

score 15 · Answer 1 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:34

15

The problem is not in the cat line but in the echo line. To get the line breaks, you need to use:

echo "$chksitename"

See also Capturing Multiple Line Output to a Bash Variable.

edited May 23 '17 at 12:34

Community

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answered Dec 18 '11 at 17:42

Jonathan Leffler

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This should be the accepted answer – Ich Mar 31 '22 at 10:24

uzsolt · Answer 2 · 2011-12-18T19:42:53.090

1

I think you can replace your cat/grep/sed with one sed:

sed -e -n "/$sitename/ s@^.*\("$sitename".*jpg\).*$@\1@pg" wget.html

And you can replace sort | uniq to sort -u.

edited Dec 18 '11 at 19:42

answered Dec 18 '11 at 16:34

uzsolt

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score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Dec 18 '11 at 10:39

0

You could try:

echo $chksitename | tr ' ' '\n'

answered Dec 18 '11 at 10:39

Mat

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That's a very funny way to do it; it works, no doubt, but not orthodox. – Jonathan Leffler Dec 18 '11 at 17:43
I found this looking to set collapsed JSON to an env var, and I liked this method. My usage: `export TEST=$(cat test.json | tr -d '\n'| tr -d ' ')` – ryanjdillon Apr 15 '20 at 07:51

No line breaks with "cat"

3 Answers3