{ echo line1 echo line2 echo line3 ...etc... } >file
“Here documents” in bash are also useful for this kind of work. In many ways, they’re better, because they preserve the formatting of the document completely: #!/bin/bash foo=“Some Variable" cat > file << EOF verbatim text here more verbatim text here, with preceding whitespace preserved no echo command needed expand some variable here: $foo EOF will produce a file that contains everything between the two EOFs exactly. It will still expand the contents of $foo out appropriately $ ./heredoctest.sh $ cat ./file verbatim text here more verbatim text here, with preceding whitespace preserved no echo command needed expand some variable here: Some Variable More on heredocs here: http://wiki.wlug.org.nz/HereDocuments