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I want to print some usage information for some functions. I customarily use echo or printf for each line.

  echo "-V, --version"
  echo "   Display the version number and copyrights of the invoked tool."
  echo "-u, --usage"
  echo "   Provides brief information on how to use this tool."
  echo "-h, --help"
  echo "   Print a description of the command-line options understood by"

Recently I have been looking at list where one can set a long multi-line string instead.

(defun myfunc ()
  "-V, --version
   Display the version number and copyrights of the invoked tool.
-u, --usage
   Provides brief information on how to use this tool.
-h, --help
   Print a description of the command-line options understood by"

  (commands-here))

I would like to do the same (as in lisp) for printing documentation for bash scripts. What can I do to achieve the same?

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2 Answers 2

Reset to default
2

Like this, using here-doc:

cat<<'EOF'
  "-V, --version
   Display the version number and copyrights of the invoked tool.
-u, --usage
   Provides brief information on how to use this tool.
-h, --help
   Print a description of the command-line options understood by"
EOF

Check man bash | less +/here-doc

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3
  • 2
    Single-quote 'EOF' where first used to avoid evaluation of the string. Not sure what those double-quotes are doing..? Commented Nov 28, 2022 at 18:20
  • Yes, but there's no variables/nothing to escape Commented Nov 28, 2022 at 18:20
  • 1
    Me, I'd use single quotes instead of doubles (or none) anywhere I wanted to be sure there was no evaluation. So printf '%s\n' … rather than printf "%s\n" …, and <<'EOF' rather than <<EOF, etc. Commented Nov 28, 2022 at 18:21
-1

You can use a multiline string:

echo '
-V, --version
   Display the version number and copyrights of the invoked tool.
-u, --usage
   Provides brief information on how to use this tool.
-h, --help
   Print a description of the command-line options understood by
'

The downside with this way of formatting is the first blank line. You can avoid that at the expense of a little clarify by starting the first line of text immediately after the quote, and closing the quotes immediately after the last line of text:

echo '-V, --version
   Display the version number and copyrights of the invoked tool.
-u, --usage
   Provides brief information on how to use this tool.
-h, --help
   Print a description of the command-line options understood by'
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3
  • Would you be so kind to modify h]the answer to use a string rather than a direct call to echo. Commented Nov 28, 2022 at 18:48
  • @Heime you know how to assign to a variable? a='some text here …' and then printf '%s\n' "$a" Commented Nov 28, 2022 at 19:40
  • Ok, I can just make a multiline quoted string. Have seen that the newline is inserted automatically for each line without requiring \n at end of each line, Commented Nov 28, 2022 at 20:01

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