OT: posix sh problem

[Mark Felder]

On Thu, 04 Apr 2013 08:54:30 -0500, Teske, Devin  
<Devin.Teske at fisglobal.com> wrote:

> Wait, you can't? Then I've been doing something wrong all these years…
> #!/bin/sh
> printf "line1\nline2\n" | while read line
> do
> 	echo "line=[$line]"
> done

You sort-of can, but it's not portable at all. As detailed here:  
http://www.etalabs.net/sh_tricks.html

>> One common pitfall is trying to read output piped from commands, such  
>> as:
>> foo | IFS= read var
>>POSIX allows any or all commands in a pipeline to be run in subshells, 
>> and which command (if any) runs in the main shell varies greatly between 
>> implementations — in particular Bash and ksh differ here. The standard 
>> idiom for overcoming this problem is to use a here document:
>>
>> IFS= read var << EOF
>> $(foo)
>> EOF


I was having problems with the variables magically becoming empty,  
remembered I had Rich's site bookmarked, checked to see if it mentioned  
and it was. I'll admit there's a high chance that due to lack of sleep  
user error was the culprit.