perl and bash external command difference

Question

My name.txt has contains:

Tom
Daniel
James

In Perl,

my $names = `cat names.txt`;
print $names;

gives me:

Tom
Daniel
James

In Bash,

names=`cat names.txt`
echo $names

gives me:

Tom Daniel James

Here's my output of od -c name.txt:

0000000    T  o  m  \n   D   a   n   i   e   l  \n   J   a   m   e   s
0000020

What is the reason of the difference?

Answer 1

Both variables receive the same value, but the way you're examining the value in Bash is flawed: use echo "$names" - note the double quotes - to see the true value.

Unquoted use of $names in Bash makes its value subject to word-splitting, which means that the whitespace-separated words in the value - Tom, Daniel, and James - are passed as separate arguments to echo, and echo concatenates those values with spaces on output.