How to Export a Multi-line Environment Variable in Bash/Terminal e.g: RSA Private Key

Question

One of our Apps github-backup requires the use of an RSA Private Key as an Environment Variable.

Simply attempting to export the key it in the terminal e.g: te

Answer 1

NOTE: For me to get the output to work correctly, I had to wrap the environment variable in double quotes. Otherwise it replaced newlines with spaces.

In:

export PRIVATE_KEY=$(cat ./gitbu.2018-03-23.private-key.pem)

Out:

echo "$PRIVATE_KEY"