How do I preserve newlines in a quoted string in Bash? [duplicate]

Question

I'm creating a script to automate the creation of apache virtual hosts. Part of my script goes like this:

MYSTRING="<VirtualHost *:80>  ServerName $NEWVHOST DocumentRoot /var/www/hosts/$NEWVHOST  ...  " echo $MYSTRING 

However, the line breaks in the script are being ignored. If I echo the string, is gets spat out as one line.

How can I ensure that the line breaks are printed?

Answer 1

Add quotes to make it work:

echo "$MYSTRING" 

Look at it this way:

MYSTRING="line-1 line-2 line3"  echo $MYSTRING 

this will be executed as:

echo line-1 \ line-2 \ line-3 

i.e. echo with three parameters, printing each parameter with a space in between them.

If you add quotes around $MYSTRING, the resulting command will be:

echo "line-1 line-2 line-3" 

i.e. echo with a single string parameter which has three lines of text and two line breaks.