To enter a command which spans more than one line that improves readability and maintainability, a statement continuation character (\) is used. The continuation character might be used to arbitrarily break a line after any complete syntactic token. Any characters appearing after the continuation character might be preserved but, if so, are treated as comments.

Within a string literal, a backslash '\' character can be entered as '\\'. This is not treated as a continuation.

The last non-comment character on any line which does not have a continuation character is treated as the termination of the current command, at which time the command must be syntactically complete or an error message is produced.