What does the <<- redirection do in Bash here documents?

• A. Ignores leading spaces in the here document.
• B. Removes indentation spaces using a tab at the start of lines
• C. Ignores leading tab characters in the here document.
• D. Enables wildcard expansion inside the here document

Answer: (C)

In Bash, the dash after the here-document delimiter lets you indent the block in your script and still have clean content processed. It does this by removing a leading tab character from each line of the here document before it's used. So you can align the block with the surrounding code using tabs, without those tabs appearing in the actual input.

Important nuance: only leading tab characters are stripped. If a line starts with spaces instead of a tab, those spaces remain in the content. For example, using a block indented with tabs will yield output without those tabs, while indenting with spaces will not remove them.

The dash variant isn’t about wildcard or other expansions—the behavior here is about stripping leading tabs for indentation convenience, not enabling or disabling expansions.