write terminal output to file while keeping new lines

Asked Jun 07 '22 at 10:52

Active Jun 07 '22 at 11:47

Viewed 347 times

when I call env to see the environment variables it shows nicely with new lines:

$ env
SHELL=/bin/sh    
EDITOR=vi
PWD=/home/user
...

but when I want to store this to a file the new lines get discarded:

$ echo $(env) > root.env
SHELL=/bin/sh EDITOR=vi PWD=/home/user ...

What goes wrong? how can I store the env output with each item on a line?

asked Jun 07 '22 at 10:52

DEKKER

Try env > root.env. No need to use a subshell. – Stewart Jun 07 '22 at 10:57
@Stewart Well thanks that worked, but why echo fails then? – DEKKER Jun 07 '22 at 11:03
Typing it in an answer. But it's because the subshell returns line-by-line. Not just a single string of text containing newlines. – Stewart Jun 07 '22 at 11:08
It's the same word-splitting issue as Why does echo of awk in a bash script remove line breaks? – steeldriver Jun 07 '22 at 11:23
and also see http://mywiki.wooledge.org/WordSplitting. But there's seldom, if ever a need to do echo $(...), the echo and the command substitution just undo each other. – ilkkachu Jun 07 '22 at 11:47
What is wrong with echo $(stuff)? – Kamil Maciorowski Jun 08 '22 at 20:00

0 Answers0