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Discussion on: Share your most embarrassing shell pipeline

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glsolaria profile image
G.L Solaria

It is just to allow the one line to be broken across two lines. It aids readability because you do not have to scroll horizontally.

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sinewalker profile image
Mike Lockhart

Yes, there's a lot of different use for the back slash here. They all mean "escape" in different flavours.

First escapes my grep alias and runs normal grep

Then there is the slosh immediately before the newline, makes the line break but escapes the meaning as end-of-command to bash

Then in the awk command there is \t which is an "escape code" for a TAB

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bananabrann profile image
Lee

Well he'll! Thanks!

Excuse me as I go rewrite all my shell files