Hello. See https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/253518/where-are-bash-line-continuations-after-and-documented.
Roughly put, wherever lines terminating with a particular token are syntactically valid, they are taken as complete, and an explicit \ is required to continue the line, but lines ending with && || or I and lines where an array definition has been started with =( but not closed with a ) implicitly continue to the next physical line. This is not documented under the manual section describing explicit line joining/continuation: https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/html_node/Escape-Character.html#Escape-Character but the similar specification for Python is properly and clearly documented in the Python docs: https://docs.python.org/3/reference/lexical_analysis.html#explicit-line-joining The StackExchange conversation mention of "In POSIX, it's specified via the grammar rules" seems to indicate that though this behaviour is not documented, it is the expected behaviour as per POSIX. Thus I request that the Bash docs clearly document this behaviour. -- Shriramana Sharma ஶ்ரீரமணஶர்மா श्रीरमणशर्मा 𑀰𑁆𑀭𑀻𑀭𑀫𑀡𑀰𑀭𑁆𑀫𑀸
