Command-Line Scan

Command-Line Scan
When you type a command at the shell prompt, you can continue until you type a carriage-return character.  When the shell receives the carriage-return it parses the whole line left to right.  When the shell parses the line it looks for special characters that it must interpret.   When you place a backslash at the end of a line  it tells the bash shell to ignore the RETURN character so the line continues onto the next line without a break.

Lesson 5 / Lesson 7

    echo This is part of a shell script demonstrating that you can continue a line \
    on the next line and the RETURN is not read.

If you have a very long command to enter, you may find it handier to break it up into two or more lines.  You can do that by entering part of the command, followed by a \.