Enable line breaks when assigning multi line outputs to var in bash

Question

I'm using the following very basic shell script I copied off the net to list the contents of my database backup folder and mail them regularily:

MYSQLLIST=$(ls -lhG /var/backups/mysql/daily/)
SUBJECT="daily backup finished"
EMAIL="logging@localhost"
EMAILMESSAGE="/tmp/emailmessage.txt"
echo "dailybackup.sh ran successfully" > $EMAILMESSAGE
echo "MYSQL:" >> $EMAILMESSAGE
echo $MYSQLLIST >> $EMAILMESSAGE
mail -s "$SUBJECT" "$EMAIL" < $EMAILMESSAGE

However - regardless the mail reader - in the mail I receive there are no linebreaks between the rows of the ls output, which makes the message terribly hard to read. How could I produce linebreaks identical to those I get when executing ls -lhG on the shell?

Answer 1

Try dropping the command sutstitution that stuffs a variable and then echos it back and just redirect the output of ls straight to the message file.

SUBJECT="daily backup finished"
EMAIL="logging@localhost"
EMAILMESSAGE="/tmp/emailmessage.txt"
echo "dailybackup.sh ran successfully" > $EMAILMESSAGE
echo "MYSQL:" >> $EMAILMESSAGE
ls -lhG /var/backups/mysql/daily/ >> $EMAILMESSAGE
mail -s "$SUBJECT" "$EMAIL" < $EMAILMESSAGE

Edit: You could further clean up this script with exactly the same result like this:

(
    echo "dailybackup.sh ran successfully"
    echo "MYSQL:"
    ls -lhG /var/backups/mysql/daily/
) | mail -s "Daily backup finished" "logging@localhost"

This runs a few commands in a subshell and then directs the entire output from the subshell straight into mail without the fuss of writing a temporary file.