Egrep over multiple lines in a bash script function

Question

I have a function to check a file against multiple long strings seperated by pipes. I want to put each string in the script on a new line so it's more readable. I've tried adding backslashes to the end of each line but they're just caught within the grep statement.

my_function () {
sudo zcat my_file.gz |
egrep -c 'my_long_string_1 |
my_long_string_2 |
my_long_string_3'
}

This does output a result, however, it's incorrect.

Answer 1

Use egrep like this on multiple lines:

my_function () {
   sudo zcat my_file.gz |
   egrep -c "my_long_string_1|\
   my_long_string_2|\
   my_long_string_3"
}

Make sure there is no space before or after backslash and there is no space on new lines before each pattern of egrep.