On 1/5/2011 2:58 PM, Brunner, Brian T. wrote:
>
>> On Wed, 2011-01-05 at 19:16 +0000, Keith Roberts wrote:
>>> I'm trying to add a long list of mount options in my fstab,
>> and break
>>> the entry over 2 lines, as it goes off screen.
>>
>> $ man fstab
>> /line
>>
>> Each filesystem is described on a separate line;
>
> This is ambiguous as it stands; many tools understand 'line
> continuation' by a '\n' meaning multiple human-readable-lines treated as
> a single input line, however it appears fstab (meaning the tools that
> read it) do not promise to abide this continue-the-previous-line
> tradition.
I think it is more common for a '\' at the end of line to escape the
usual meaning of the newline and have it interpreted as white space, but
I don't know if fstab is parsed that way. Usually the convention only
matters if you are going to mail the content or send it through other
mechanisms that likely to reformat it.
But, there is a more basic problem if the editor used to make this
change doesn't wrap to the next screen line so you can edit without
introducing a newline into the content. I thought they've all done that
for decades.
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell at gmail.com