from the desk of stinkpot

spread a one-line command over multiple lines

July 11th, 2007 by Lawrence David

to spread a one-line command over multiple lines in a shell script, end each line with a slash and indent the next line.  for instance:

cat $1 | sed ‘s/>FALF/F_FAL/g’  \
| sed ‘s/>FAL1/1_FAL/g’  \
| sed ‘s/>FAL5/5_FAL/g’  \
| sed ‘s/>FALZ/Z_FAL/g’  \
| sed ‘s/>OUTGROUP/5_OUTGROUP/’ > $2

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

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One Response to “spread a one-line command over multiple lines”

1. on 01 Oct 2007 at 2:18 pm   Eric Brunson

   That’s a good tip, but the example you used (sed) can be better written as:

   sed “s/>FALF/F_FAL/g
   s/>FAL1/1_FAL/g
   s/>FAL5/5_FAL/g
   s/>FALZ/Z_FAL/g
   s/>OUTGROUP/5_OUTGROUP/” $1 > $2

   Saves five processes. This doesn’t change your original meaning that you can spread multiple commands over several lines, but sed can take multiple directives in a single program.