To Be Continued

I hate backslashes. They make code harder to read.

In these four code snippets, I like the first two, but not the last two:

sleep 10 & date

sleep 10 &
date

sleep 10 & \
date

sleep 10 \
& date

So? So, for the same reason, I would re-write:

grep :0: /etc/passwd | \
wc -l

as

grep :0: /etc/passwd |
wc -l

and

grep -c jsh /etc/passwd \
|| echo jsh not found

as

grep jsh /etc/passwd ||
echo jsh not found

The symbols ', ", `, &, |, &&, and ||, at the ends of lines, say "I'm not done," and automatically continue to the next line (or, in the case of the quote, until the closing quote).

For shell symbols with parens, like $( and <(, the continuation is until the matching, closing paren.