Re: [Help-bash] Understanding read -r

[Dan Douglas]

On Thursday, September 27, 2012 11:03:54 AM Bob Proulx wrote:
> Peng Yu wrote:
> > The following example shows that "\" at the line end means line
> > continuation. Is this wrong? Or I misunderstand the document?
> 
> You forgot to quote the EOF part.  See the stackoverflow reference.
> Therefore the shell interpreted the string contents before 'read'
> processing.
> 
> > read -r -d '' VAR <<EOF
> 
> Add quotes there.
> 
>   read -r -d '' VAR <<'EOF'
> 
> Again, this has to do with the here-document part and not the 'read' part.
> 
> Bob

This also suppresses the expansions of course. Not sure if you want that.

{ var=$(</dev/stdin); } <<EOF
blah
$foo $bar\
more text
EOF

Now both line continuations and expansions are done as you probably want them, 
rather than letting read mangle things without -r.

As an aside, mksh has an interesting syntax to assign a heredoc result directly 
to a variable:

# mksh

var=<<EOF
...
EOF

This is optimized to happen in memory with no temporary file.

-- 
Dan Douglas