How to tell bash that the line continues on the next line

Question

In a bash script I got from another programmer, some lines exceeded 80 columns in length. What is the character or thing to be added to the line in order to indicate that th

Answer 1

\ does the job. @Guillaume's answer and @George's comment clearly answer this question. Here I explains why The backslash has to be the very last character before the end of line character. Consider this command:

   mysql -uroot \
   -hlocalhost      

If there is a space after \, the line continuation will not work. The reason is that \ removes the special meaning for the next character which is a space not the invisible line feed character. The line feed character is after the space not \ in this example.