How to concatenate string variables in Bash

Question

In PHP, strings are concatenated together as follows:

$foo = \"Hello\";
$foo .= \" World\";

Here, $foo becomes \"Hello World\"

Answer 1

If what you are trying to do is to split a string into several lines, you can use a backslash:

$ a="hello\
> world"
$ echo $a
helloworld

With one space in between:

$ a="hello \
> world"
$ echo $a
hello world

This one also adds only one space in between:

$ a="hello \
>      world"
$ echo $a
hello world