CodexBloom - Programming Q&A Platform

Bash script scenarios to capture output from a command run in a subshell with pipe

πŸ‘€ Views: 685 πŸ’¬ Answers: 1 πŸ“… Created: 2025-07-15
bash subshell pipe output-capture

After trying multiple solutions online, I still can't figure this out. I'm stuck trying to I'm performance testing and I'm trying to capture the output of a command that's executed in a subshell and piped to `grep`, but I'm finding that the output is not being assigned to my variable... My script looks like this: ```bash #!/bin/bash output=$( (echo -e "line1\nline2\nline3" | grep line) ) echo "Captured Output: $output" ``` When I run this script, I expect "Captured Output: line1\nCaptured Output: line2\nCaptured Output: line3", but instead, I just get an empty output. I've tried various combinations of quotes and even stripped down the command to its simplest form, but nothing seems to work. I've also tested with different examples, like running `ls | grep .txt`, and it seems to behave the same way. If I remove the subshell and just run the command directly like this: ```bash output=$(echo -e "line1\nline2\nline3" | grep line) echo "Captured Output: $output" ``` this works fine, and I get the expected output. I am running this on Bash version 5.0.17. Is there a reason the output isn’t being captured when using a subshell, or is this a known behavior with piping? How can I fix this so I can capture the output correctly when using subshells? I recently upgraded to Bash LTS. Any feedback is welcome! Any ideas what could be causing this? This is for a REST API running on Ubuntu 20.04. Am I approaching this the right way? I'm using Bash 3.9 in this project. I'm open to any suggestions.