How do I break up an extremely long string literal in bash?

Question

I would like to embed a long command like this in a bash script:

mycommand \\
    --server myserver \\
    --filename extremely/long/file/name/that/i/would/like/         


        

Answer 1

Basically, there is nothing built into bash to do this.
A wrapper is typically more trouble than it's worth, but that said, you could try an alias or a funciton, eg. j

j(){sed -e ':a;$!N;s/ *\n *//g;ta' <<<"$1"}

echo "$(j "3   spaces  
           /hello
           /world
           /this
           /is
           /a
           /long
           /path
          ")"

# 3   spaces/hello/world/this/is/a/long/path