echo hello | read name #no work

[Doyan]

Hi, I am stumped as to why the follow command does not work.

echo hello | read name

I have tried the command on a couple different linux distro's and it does not save the word hello in the name variable. Odd thing is it doesn't return a error either, it returns the prompt which leads me to believe it worked but when I echo the variable $name, nothing is saved in it.

 

[DefineByte]

The problem is that when you use a pipe the read command is being executed in a subshell, so you can't access the variable locally. As to how to get around that...my shell scripting skills are rather lacking. >.>

 

[Christopher]

name=`echo hello`

This should do what you want.

 

[Boomslang]

name=`echo hello`

This should do what you want.

At that point, you might as well just do name=hello , no?

 

[eeyrjmr]

Since people have been posting "better" ways todo this (and they are right) I thought I would just post how todo what you want (if you /really/ want todo it that way...)

read, reads from stdin, thus you must pass it data from stdin. a PIPE is NOT!!! stdin

read name < <(echo hello)
echo $name

 

[Christopher]

At that point, you might as well just do name=hello , no?

Yes, but its a proof of concept. The backtick operation could be anything that would produce dynamically generated results.