Talk:Setting up a mailserver
Escaping line breaks with \'s should work, period. Why would it not? (only reason I can think of that it wouldn't is if you add a space before that line break (eg \ [linebreak] instead of \[linebreak]).
don't ask me why not, but I know for a fact I've had to edit it out in several scripts / conf files / I forget exactly what and when, when compiling software written for linux. 99% of the time it works, but you never know when that 1% that it won't work is going to bite you in the ass. Safer just not to fsck with it.
--Jimbo 23:59, 5 Nov 2004 (EST)
the thought occurs that sh and bash/csh/etc might treat \ differently? dunno what else it could be. the only time i use it is directly at the CLI, scripts and files i just keep typing and let vi wrap the line. i've never run across this myself.
--Dave
Actually yeah I think that might have been it. Escaping line breaks works under sh or bash, but not under csh, IIRC, and you never quite know for sure what's going to wind up processing a conf or a script in a complex process. Also keep in mind that occasionally they'll get parsed by somebody's Perl script, and if they chomp()ed the lines then there's no line break to BE escaped, and... blah blah blah. You get the idea.
Anyway I tend to have a philosophy of "if some complicated thingy you don't actually need breaks one time out of 100, just never use the fucker and then you don't have to sweat it if something DOES break. One less thing to troubleshoot." So I tend to recommend NOT using escape-line-breaks, and instead just writing things that are one line AS one line.
--Jimbo 10:08, 6 Nov 2004 (EST)
