Accessing the output of a Bash pipe with 'read'

Posted by Karthik on Super User See other posts from Super User or by Karthik
Published on 2010-08-08T02:39:13Z Indexed on 2012/10/01 15:43 UTC
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bash

|

pipe

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read

I'm trying to pipe some data from a Bash pipe into a Bash variable using the read command, like this:

$ echo "Alexander the Grape" | read quot
$ echo $quot
$

But quot is empty. Some Googling revealed that this is not a bug; it's an intended feature of Bash. (Section E5 in the FAQ.)

But when I tried the same thing in zsh, it worked. (Ditto for ksh.) Is there any way to make this work in Bash? I really don't want to have to type:

$ quot=$(echo "Alexander the Grape")

Especially for long commands.

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