Indenting Bash Script Output

Question

I am attempting to write a bash script and I am having difficulty making the output look neat and organized. I could fall back on just using newlines, but I would much rather have output that was easy to read. For instance, when I run git clone ..., I want to first echo "Cloning repository" and then have the output of git indented. Example output:

Cloning repository...
    Initialized empty Git repository in /root/client_scripts/jojo/.git/
    remote: Counting objects: 130, done.
    remote: Compressing objects: 100% (121/121), done.
    remote: Total 130 (delta 13), reused 113 (delta 6)
    Receiving objects: 100% (130/130), 176.07 KiB, done.
    Resolving deltas: 100% (13/13), done.

Currently, it's all compressed with no indentation. Does anyone know how to do this? I attempted with sed and awk but it didn't seem to show any more output than just Initialized empty Git repository in /root/client_scripts/jojo/.git/. I would greatly appreciate any comments.

Answer 1

Pipe through

sed "s/^/    /g"

This will replace the (zero-width) anchor for line start by four spaces, effectively adding four spaces at the start of the line.

(The g does this globally; without it, it will only do it once, which would do the first line.)

Answer 2

A different solution that doesn't require sed:

command | (while read; do echo "    $REPLY"; done)