Capturing multiple line output into a Bash variable

Question

I've got a script 'myscript' that outputs the following:

abc
def
ghi

in another script, I call:

declare RESULT=$(./myscript)

and $RESULT gets the value

abc def ghi

Is there a way to store the result either with the newlines, or with '\n' character so I can output it with 'echo -e'?

Answer 1

Actually, RESULT contains what you want — to demonstrate:

echo "$RESULT"

What you show is what you get from:

echo $RESULT

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As noted in the comments, the difference is that (1) the double-quoted version of the variable (echo "$RESULT") preserves internal spacing of the value exactly as it is represented in the variable — newlines, tabs, multiple blanks and all — whereas (2) the unquoted version (echo $RESULT) replaces each sequence of one or more blanks, tabs and newlines with a single space. Thus (1) preserves the shape of the input variable, whereas (2) creates a potentially very long single line of output with 'words' separated by single spaces (where a 'word' is a sequence of non-whitespace characters; there needn't be any alphanumerics in any of the words).

Answer 2

Another pitfall with this is that command substitution — $() — strips trailing newlines. Probably not always important, but if you really want to preserve exactly what was output, you'll have to use another line and some quoting:

RESULTX="$(./myscript; echo x)"
RESULT="${RESULTX%x}"

This is especially important if you want to handle all possible filenames (to avoid undefined behavior like operating on the wrong file).

Answer 3

In case that you're interested in specific lines, use a result-array:

declare RESULT=($(./myscript))  # (..) = array
echo "First line: ${RESULT[0]}"
echo "Second line: ${RESULT[1]}"
echo "N-th line: ${RESULT[N]}"

Answer 4

In addition to the answer given by @l0b0 I just had the situation where I needed to both keep any trailing newlines output by the script and check the script's return code. And the problem with l0b0's answer is that the 'echo x' was resetting $? back to zero... so I managed to come up with this very cunning solution:

RESULTX="$(./myscript; echo x$?)"
RETURNCODE=${RESULTX##*x}
RESULT="${RESULTX%x*}"

Answer 5

How about this, it will read each line to a variable and that can be used subsequently ! say myscript output is redirected to a file called myscript_output

awk '{while ( (getline var < "myscript_output") >0){print var;} close ("myscript_output");}'

Answer 6

After trying most of the solutions here, the easiest thing I found was the obvious - using a temp file. I'm not sure what you want to do with your multiple line output, but you can then deal with it line by line using read. About the only thing you can't really do is easily stick it all in the same variable, but for most practical purposes this is way easier to deal with.

./myscript.sh > /tmp/foo
while read line ; do 
    echo 'whatever you want to do with $line'
done < /tmp/foo

Quick hack to make it do the requested action:

result=""
./myscript.sh > /tmp/foo
while read line ; do
  result="$result$line\n"
done < /tmp/foo
echo -e $result

Note this adds an extra line. If you work on it you can code around it, I'm just too lazy.

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EDIT: While this case works perfectly well, people reading this should be aware that you can easily squash your stdin inside the while loop, thus giving you a script that will run one line, clear stdin, and exit. Like ssh will do that I think? I just saw it recently, other code examples here: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/24260/reading-lines-from-a-file-with-bash-for-vs-while

One more time! This time with a different filehandle (stdin, stdout, stderr are 0-2, so we can use &3 or higher in bash).

result=""
./test>/tmp/foo
while read line  <&3; do
    result="$result$line\n"
done 3</tmp/foo
echo -e $result

you can also use mktemp, but this is just a quick code example. Usage for mktemp looks like:

filenamevar=`mktemp /tmp/tempXXXXXX`
./test > $filenamevar

Then use $filenamevar like you would the actual name of a file. Probably doesn't need to be explained here but someone complained in the comments.