SHELL

heredoc remove leading space tabs linux bash

You can change the here-doc operator to <<-. You can then indent both the here-doc and the delimiter with tabs:

#! /bin/bash
cat <<-EOF
    indented
    EOF
echo Done

heredoc remove leading space tabs linux bash

If you don't need command substitution and parameter expansion inside your here-document, you can avoid using tabs by adding the leading spaces to the delimiter:

$     cat << '    EOF'
>         indented
>     EOF
        indented
$     cat << '    EOF' | sed -r 's/^ {8}//'
>         unindented
>     EOF
unindented

heredoc remove leading space tabs linux bash

mail_content="Last Change: $dateLastChanged

    This is an automated warning of stale data for the UNC-G Blackboard Snapshot process."
    mailx -r "Systems and Operations <sysadmin@[redacted].edu>" -s "Warning Stale BB Data" jadavis6@[redacted].edu <<<"$mail_content"

heredoc remove leading space linux bash

usage () {
    # No tabs necessary!
    readarray message <<'    EOF'
        Hello, this is a cool program.
        This should get unindented.
        This code should stay indented:
            something() {
                echo It works, yo!;
            }
        That's all.
    EOF
    # Each line is indented an extra 8 spaces, so strip them
    printf '%s' "${message[@]#        }"
}

heredoc remove leading space tabs linux bash

sed 's/^ *//' >> ~/Desktop/text.txt << EOF
    Load time-out reached and nothing to resume.
    $(date +%T) - Transmission-daemon exiting.
EOF