I've been a pretty long-term user of Linux, Solaris and bash but have never found a solution to this problem. This must be pretty common so curious if others found a better way to do this.
I am doing some testing of a REST API interface using bash. I use curl commands then continuation characters like to separate out a new line for each HTTP header. I store my notes in a text file so that I can copy/paste into SecureCRT or any SSH client quickly.
====NOTE FORMAT====
$ curl xxxxxx \
-H "X-Header1: test" \
-H "X-Header2: test2" \
xxxxx
Above I can just copy and paste in to SSH and hit return and it runs the command. If I then modify something and want to paste back out of the SSH client back into my notes, I get the continuation characters, because this is how bash interprets these:
=====IN TERMINAL=====
$ echo hello \
> world
hello world
See how in the terminal we have "> " because this is how bash prompts for the next line and so forth. If you have a bunch of commands that you want to copy/paste in and out all the time with 12 different headers, it's a lot of work to clean up by removing the "> " from each line.
I've googled and found some discussion on similar things like on https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7316107/bash-continuation-lines
I hoped that in bash, I could change the continuation prompt, which I would remove the prompt by changing an environment variable, much like the PS1 variable allows you to change the command prompt. I haven't found anything in this.
In bash history, you don't see the continuation characters as it removes all of these onto a single line (very difficult to read and edit).
So, there might be some other options here:
- Find a configuration to change the continuation prompt to solve this, or find a way to do it with an environment variable.
- Use another shell which doesn't use this method or allows it to be modified. I've pretty much only used bash, little bit of csh.
- Do something like repeat the command entered and use sed or something to remove the > characters or echo the .bash_history entry and add in newline characters at certain points to make it readable.
Before I go find another way, anyone know if it's even possible to do what I'm asking with bash?
Also, I get that the continuation prompt is there for a reason otherwise it could just be a blank line - I'd be looking at a way to change an environment variable to switch back and forth, or something like that.