Question

I can’t understand why userType is not changing.

I know for certain it’s successfully reaching determineType, but it isn’t changing the value to “bbb” when I try to print out userType later.

userType="aaa"

function determineType {
    userType="bbb"
}

function checkUser {
    cat users.csv | \
    while read userLine; do
        if [[ $userLine =~ .*$user.* ]]
            then
            determineType
            echo "1"
        fi
    done
    echo "0"
}

Answer 1

As soulseekah said in a comment, your while loop is executed in a subshell. Instead, do (and, as a benefit, you get rid of the useless use of cat):

userType="aaa"

determineType() {
    userType="bbb"
}

checkUser() {
    while read userLine; do
        if [[ $userLine = *$user* ]]; then
            determineType
            return 1
        fi
    done < users.csv
    return 0
}

Note. I also changed a few things:

• got rid of the useless regexp since the same can be achieved with globbing,
• used more common ways of defining functions in bash,
• used return instead of echo for returning values: you’d run into the same problem again with an echo: you’d probably use your function checkUser in another subshell to obtain the value returned by the echo.