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mohitmun
mohitmun

Reputation: 5409

Why read builtin command has different behaviour on zsh and bash?

running following command on zsh 

zsh$ echo Hello | read str ; echo "str is: "$str

str is: Hello

whereas in bash, it doesn't work

bash$ echo Hello | read str ; echo "str is: "$str
str is:

This thread mentions read command runs in subshell so current session has no clue about it. I'm not able to find why it works in zsh.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 805

Answers (1)

Kusalananda
Kusalananda

Reputation: 15613

The read command has the same behaviour in both shells, but bash runs the read in a subshell whereas zsh does not.

Some shells don't need to use a subshell for the read in your example (in general, the last command in a pipeline).

To avoid having to switch to another shell interpreter, you may have the read read from something other than a pipe:

read str <<<'hello'
printf 'str is %s\n' "$str"

Or, if all you want is to output the string, output it in the same subshell:

echo 'hello' | { read str && printf 'str is %s\n' "$str"; }

Upvotes: 3

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