Bash : read / readarray multiline input

Question

I'm new on bash and I'm trying to write a bash script that will save user's multilines inputs (a text with newlines, somes lines of code, etc.). I need to allow newline (when you press "Enter"), multiline paste (when you paste few lines "Ctrl+V") and set a new key, instead of "Enter", to validate, send the input and continue to the next step of the script.

I tried with read but you can not do multiline.

echo "Enter content :" 
read content

I found an example with readarray here (How to delete a character in bash read -d multiline input?) that allow to press "Enter" for newline but each words separate by space are separate in the array. I would like to have only the lines separated.

echo "Enter package names, one per line: hit Ctrl-D on a blank line to stop"
readarray -t pkgs

Do you have any ideas ? Or there is maybe a completely different way to do it ? Thank you for your help.

Mark Reed · Accepted Answer · 2016-03-22 15:52:38Z

1

You can set IFS to newline so that only newlines will separate items in the array.

IFS=$'\n' readarray lines

The first line read will be ${lines[0]}, the second ${lines[1]}, etc. ${#lines[@]} tells you how many lines, and the last one will be ${lines[${#lines[@]}-1]}.

To loop over the array, you should use "${lines[@]}", not ${lines[*]}; the latter will take you right back to looping over individual words.

edited Mar 22, 2016 at 15:52

answered Mar 22, 2016 at 14:06

Mark Reed

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2 Comments

e___e Over a year ago

Hello and thank you for this answer. I didn't know about IFS. For other people that are interested :

echo "Enter package names, one per line: hit Ctrl-D on a blank line to stop" IFS=$'\n' readarray lines for line in ${lines[*]}     do 	echo "$line" >> result.txt     done

Mark Reed Over a year ago

Don't try to put blocks of code in comments; it doesn't work well. :) Also see my edit.

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