Help on bash script?

[Xu Qiang]

dpk wrote:
> On Fri, 12 Aug 2005, Xu Qiang wrote:
> As soon as you used the pipe, to the while, you entered a sub-shell.
> There's no way (that I'm aware of anyways) to get the sub-shell's
> variables sent back up to the parent.

Thanks for your detailed analysis and a solution. Yes, I didn't notice the pipe's effect. 
Btw, can we "export" a value in the sub-shell back to the parent?

thanks,
Xu Qiang