rssbash and subshelling
When using pipes in bash the last command in the pipeline is executed in a sub shell…. (in contrast to i.e. ksh). This can be inconvenient if you i.e. set a variable which will never gets known in the parent shell 🙁
Luckily Felix pointed me to a nice trick: make the last pipe a “named pipe” (with <(cmd)) and no subshell is started!
See here the difference:
$ cat subshell.sh foo=bar echo "outside (parent shell) foo is: $foo" echo bar2 | while read foo do echo "in while (subshell!) foo is: $foo" done echo "outside (parent shell) foo is still: $foo" $ bash subshell outside (parent shell) foo is: bar in while (subshell!) foo is: bar2 outside (parent shell) foo is still: bar $
$ cat nosubshell.sh foo=bar echo "outside (parent shell) foo is: $foo" while read foo < <( cat ) do echo "in while (no subshell!) foo is: $foo" break done echo "outside (parent shell) foo is now: $foo" $ bash nosubshell.sh outside (parent shell) foo is: bar blaat in while (no subshell!) foo is: blaat outside (parent shell) foo is now: blaat $