Question

I’m trying to create an alias that will get all “Modified” files and run the php syntax check on them…

function gitphpcheck () {

    filearray=()

    git diff --name-status | while read line; do 

        if [[ $line =~ ^M ]]
        then
            filename="`echo $line | awk '{ print $2 }'`"
            echo "$filename" # correct output
            filearray+=($filename)
        fi
    done

    echo "--------------FILES"
    echo ${filearray[@]}

    # will do php check here, but echo of array is blank

}

Answer 1

As Wrikken says, the while body runs in a subshell, so all changes to the filearray array will disappear when the subshell ends. A couple of different solutions come to mind:

Process substitution (less readable but does not require a subshell)

while read line; do 
  :
done < <(git diff --name-status)
echo "${filearray[@]}"

Use the modified variable in the subshell using command grouping

git diff --name-status | {
  while read line; do
    :
  done
  echo "${filearray[@]}"
}
# filearray is empty here