> [scarolan at server:~]$ echo $myvar > Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, co sectetur adipisci g elit. > lots of letter ! > > Weird huh? Ok, I'm a bonehead; I had this in my bash history: IFS='\n' That seems to have been the cause of the missing n's. Now the next question would be, how can I include the \n characters in my variable string, without fudging with $IFS?