Question

I’ve been trying to read input into environment variables from program output like this:

echo first second | read A B ; echo $A-$B 

And the result is:

-

Both A and B are always empty. I read about bash executing piped commands in sub-shell and that basically preventing one from piping input to read. However, the following:

echo first second | while read A B ; do echo $A-$B ; done

Seems to work, the result is:

first-second

Can someone please explain what is the logic here? Is it that the commands inside the while … done construct are actually executed in the same shell as echo and not in a sub-shell?

Answer 1

How to do a loop against stdin and get result stored in a variable

Under bash (and other shell also), when you pipe something to another command via |, you will implicitly create a fork, a subshell that is a child of current session. The subshell can’t affect current session’s environment.

So this:

TOTAL=0
printf "%s %s\n" 9 4 3 1 77 2 25 12 226 664 |
  while read A B;do
      ((TOTAL+=A-B))
      printf "%3d - %3d = %4d -> TOTAL= %4d\n" $A $B $[A-B] $TOTAL
    done
echo final total: $TOTAL

won’t give expected result! :

  9 -   4 =    5 -> TOTAL=    5
  3 -   1 =    2 -> TOTAL=    7
 77 -   2 =   75 -> TOTAL=   82
 25 -  12 =   13 -> TOTAL=   95
226 - 664 = -438 -> TOTAL= -343
echo final total: $TOTAL
final total: 0

Where computed TOTAL could’nt be reused in main script.

Inverting the fork

By using bash Process Substitution, Here Documents or Here Strings, you could inverse the fork:

Here strings

read A B <<<"first second"
echo $A
first

echo $B
second

Here Documents

while read A B;do
    echo $A-$B
    C=$A-$B
  done << eodoc
first second
third fourth
eodoc
first-second
third-fourth

outside of the loop:

echo : $C
: third-fourth

Here Commands

TOTAL=0
while read A B;do
    ((TOTAL+=A-B))
    printf "%3d - %3d = %4d -> TOTAL= %4d\n" $A $B $[A-B] $TOTAL
  done < <(
    printf "%s %s\n" 9 4 3 1 77 2 25 12 226 664
)
  9 -   4 =    5 -> TOTAL=    5
  3 -   1 =    2 -> TOTAL=    7
 77 -   2 =   75 -> TOTAL=   82
 25 -  12 =   13 -> TOTAL=   95
226 - 664 = -438 -> TOTAL= -343

# and finally out of loop:
echo $TOTAL
-343

Now you could use $TOTAL in your main script.

Piping to a command list

But for working only against stdin, you may create a kind of script into the fork:

printf "%s %s\n" 9 4 3 1 77 2 25 12 226 664 | {
    TOTAL=0
    while read A B;do
        ((TOTAL+=A-B))
        printf "%3d - %3d = %4d -> TOTAL= %4d\n" $A $B $[A-B] $TOTAL
    done
    echo "Out of the loop total:" $TOTAL
  }

Will give:

  9 -   4 =    5 -> TOTAL=    5
  3 -   1 =    2 -> TOTAL=    7
 77 -   2 =   75 -> TOTAL=   82
 25 -  12 =   13 -> TOTAL=   95
226 - 664 = -438 -> TOTAL= -343
Out of the loop total: -343

Note: $TOTAL could not be used in main script (after last right curly bracket } ).

Using lastpipe bash option

As @CharlesDuffy correctly pointed out, there is a bash option used to change this behaviour. But for this, we have to first disable job control:

shopt -s lastpipe           # Set *lastpipe* option
set +m                      # Disabling job control
TOTAL=0
printf "%s %s\n" 9 4 3 1 77 2 25 12 226 664 |
  while read A B;do
      ((TOTAL+=A-B))
      printf "%3d - %3d = %4d -> TOTAL= %4d\n" $A $B $[A-B] $TOTAL
    done

  9 -   4 =    5 -> TOTAL= -338
  3 -   1 =    2 -> TOTAL= -336
 77 -   2 =   75 -> TOTAL= -261
 25 -  12 =   13 -> TOTAL= -248
226 - 664 = -438 -> TOTAL= -686

echo final total: $TOTAL
-343

This will work, but I (personally) don’t like this because this is not standard and won’t help to make script readable. Also disabling job control seem expensive for accessing this behaviour.

Note: Job control is enabled by default only in interactive sessions. So set +m is not required in normal scripts.

So forgotten set +m in a script would create different behaviours if run in a console or if run in a script. This will not going to make this easy to understand or to debug…