Indenting multi-line output in a shell script

Question

I\'m trying to change the message of the day (MOTD) on my Ubuntu Amazon EC2 box so that it will display the git status of one of my directories when I SSH in.

The output

Answer 1

Thanks to @Barmar and @Marplesoft for some nice simple solutions - here is another variation that others might like - a function you can tell how many indent levels using pr:

indent() {
  local indentSize=2
  local indent=1
  if [ -n "$1" ]; then indent=$1; fi
  pr -to $(($indent * $indentSize))
}

# Example usage
ls -al | indent
git status | indent 2

Answer 2

Pipe it to sed to insert 2 spaces at the beginning of each line.

git status | sed 's/^/  /'

Answer 3

Building on @Barmar's answer, this is a tidier way to do it:

indent() { sed 's/^/  /'; }

git status | indent
other_command | indent