(Some of the following notes surely apply to bash, don't know about other shells).
You can use the backtick operator or its equivalent (and prefearable, IMHO): return1=`/path/to/script.pl arg1 arg2`
return2=$(/path/to/script.pl arg1 arg2)
The latter has the added advantage of allowing nested subshell invocations.
If your return value can have newlines, I'd suggest to use double quotes: return_newlines="$(/path/to/script.pl arg1 arg2)"
And yes, you can use read as well, but you have to be extremely careful about what you want to do. Suppose you have the following script:#!/usr/bin/perl
print $_, $/ for @ARGV;
and you want to set the variable value to the contents of the last line:#!/bin/bash
value=0
echo "value starts from $value"
./script.pl arg1 arg2 | while read line ; do
value=$line
echo "value is $value"
done
echo "after first while, value is $value"
while read line ; do
value=$line
echo "value is $value"
done <<<"$(./script.pl arg1 arg2)"
echo "finally, value is $value"
you obtain:value starts from 0
value is arg1
value is arg2
after first while, value is 0
value is arg1
value is arg2
finally, value is arg2
Note that after the first while the variable value has not been modified. This is due to the fact that the first while cycle is being executed inside a subshell.
OTOH, the second while is executed directly by the "current" shell. This may lead to problems if you pass a lot of data back, anyway.
Note that there are also other ways, but there is too little space on the side of this post to write them.
Flavio
perl -ple'$_=reverse' <<<ti.xittelop@oivalf
Don't fool yourself.
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