Section 6.6. Redirection

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6.6. Redirection

Bash supplies an additional redirection capability over the standard shell redirection, the ability to strip leading tabs off of "here" documents. Figure 6-22 shows the augmented syntax.

command << [-] word

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If word is preceded by a -, then leading tabs are removed from the lines of input that follow. Here's an example:

$ cat <<- ENDOFTEXT >           this input contains >     some leading tabs >ENDOFTEXT this input contains some leading tabs $ _ 

This allows "here" text in a script to be indented to match the nearby shell commands without affecting how the text is used.