How can I separate a long path into multiple lines?

Question

I want to separate a long path to multiple lines, like this:

cd foo1/foo2/foo3/foo4/bar

to

cd foo1\
   foo2\
   foo3\
   foo4\
   bar

Answer 1

You can separate a long command into multiple lines by using backslashes, but you would need to preserve the forward-slashes and omit the leading spaces:

cd foo1\
/foo2\
/foo3\
/foo4\
/bar

The backslashes are a line-continuation marker; when bash sees them, it incorporates the next line as if it was continued at the backslash of the current line. As a result, you couldn't use leading spaces on those subsequent lines, since they'd become spaces on the current line, creating a "too many arguments" error.

Answer 2

You could do this with an array but the cd command looks a bit complicated:

path=(
    foo1
    foo2
    foo3
    foo4
    bar
)
cd "$(IFS=/; echo "${path[*]}")"

Array literals allow for arbitrary whitespace.