CentOS - Jan 2022 - Echoing statements in bash script

Using a bash script I want to echo several strings to a file. The echo
statement, however, is in a function and thus indented but I do /not/ want the
strings echoed indented in the new file. Is this doable?

Here is an example:

f () {

??? echo "

??? # this is a test

??? a=123

??? b=456" > file.txt

}

File.txt should the contain:

# this is a test

a=123

b=456

Thus no indentation. It seems that if I prepend each line with \b the line
should be backspaced which would work nicely but the echo statement seems to
replace a backspace within the quotes to spaces...

On 1/14/22 17:18, H wrote:
> Using a bash script I want to echo several strings to a file. The echo
statement, however, is in a function and thus indented but I do /not/ want the
strings echoed indented in the new file. Is this doable?


I don't think you can do that for strings passed as arguments, but you 
can do that with strings that are here-documents: 
https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/bash-cookbook/0596526784/ch03s04.html

So, maybe:

f () {
 ??? cat > file.txt <<-'EOF'
 ?? ?# this is a test
 ?? ?a=123
 ?? ?b=456
 ?? ?EOF
}


(Note that those lines need to be indented with tabs.? None of my email 
editors will compose in plain text at the moment, oddly, so those are 
being converted to spaces)