Preserve spacing and newline characters while using 'subshell' method

Question

by describing my issue, I refer to the following code:

#!/bin/bash
#fileName: subMet.sh

cmd="$(ls -l | cat -n)"

echo $cmd

Then, in the script above I used double quotes to assign a value to cmd, because I've read that, in this way, it's possibile to preserve spacing and newline characters, in the output. Anyway it doesn't happen.

Can anyone tell me where I am wrong? More, can anyone tell me how to preserve the spacing and newlines?

I hope I have exposed my issue in a decent way, and I thank you in advance.

Answer 1

You should quote it in the echo statement, not in the assignment statement.

cmd=$(ls -l | cat -n)
echo  "$cmd"