The escape \ provides a means of writing a multi-line command.

• By default — each separate line constitutes a different command in Bash
• Escape character — \ - within echo command at the end of line escapes the newline, provided you put it into double quotes (quoting is a different story altogether)

echo "This will print
as two lines."

>>> This will print
>>> as two lines.


echo "This will print \
as one line"

>>> This will print as one line.

• What matters here is escape character outside of strings, at the end of script lines
• If a script line ends with a pipe | then an escape \ is unnecessary as pipe is a "natural line continuator"
• According Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide, it is a good programming practice to always escape the EOL of code continuing into the newline
• I have not been doing this in python, nor in powershell
• Quite the opposite!
• In Powershell, my approach has been defined by Get-PowerShellBlog > Bye Bye Backtick: Natural Line Continuations in PowerShell and I would never use a ` (backtick, which is an escape char) as it's just invisible
• In Python, my approach has been, naturally, defined by https://pep8.org/#maximum-line-length which clearly prefers implied line continuation inside parentheses, brackets and braces
• Let’s stay in bash and conclude that the following are synonymous and the third one is recommended if you want to break code into multiple lines

echo "$(pwd)" | cut -d "/" -f5
>>> Admin

echo "$(pwd)" | 
cut -d "/" -f5
>>> Admin 

echo "$(pwd)" | \
cut -d "/" -f 5
>>> Admin

LINKS

• Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide: Chapter 5. Quoting
• Get-PowerShellBlog > Bye Bye Backtick: Natural Line Continuations in PowerShell
• syntax — Is line continuation with backslash dangerous in Python? — Stack Overflow