[Gllug] Bourne shell programming

[Mike Brodbelt]

I've got an irritating shell problem, and as I only code shell when I
absolutely have to, I can't see a way round it right now.

I'm doing something like:-

grep root /etc/passwd | awk -F: '{print $1,$2,$3}' | while read x
do
	some stuff
done

That's not exactly it, but it illustrates what I'm attempting.

Now variables I set inside the loop vanish, as the pipe causes a
subshell to be spawned, so I can't set variables in the body of my loop
that are visible to the rest of the script. In the case of a file, I
could simply do "exec < myfile" to replace stdin, so I could use the
loop without a pipe, and thus not spawn a subshell.

How can I replace stdin with the output of my previous command? I need
to be able to read from the pipeline....

Thanks,

Mike
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