Firstly, the readability advantage of this indenting is not that clear cut because with the typically much longer lines of real scripting important stuff gets pushed off to the right, and readability of job scripts is also important when things go wrong.  Secondly, even though the indentation doesn't matter to basht, it could matter in principle - e.g. we might want to support Python job scripts in the future. Finally, indenting the internal lines of a multi-line string as if each line - as opposed to the string in its entirety - "belongs to" to the surrounding block, offends my sense of rightness!!  You would not do the same thing for  a multiline string in program source code even though the readability argument would still apply there - it is the purpose to which the string is put (e.g. printing to the terminal without inexplicable indentation) that matters!