👀 Views: 89 💬 Answers: 1 📅 Created: 2025-09-06

bash grep arrays

I'm prototyping a solution and I tried several approaches but none seem to work... I'm upgrading from an older version and Can someone help me understand Quick question that's been bugging me - I tried several approaches but none seem to work. I'm relatively new to this, so bear with me. I'm having trouble capturing and processing multiline output from a `grep` command into an array in a Bash script. I want to search for a pattern in a file and store the matching lines in an array for further processing. However, it seems that the way I'm trying to capture the output isn't working as expected. Here's what I've tried so far: ```bash #!/bin/bash declare -a matches # Trying to grep lines containing 'ERROR' and storing in an array while IFS= read -r line; do matches+=("$line") done < <(grep 'ERROR' mylogfile.log) # Print the matches for verification printf '%s\n' "${matches[@]}" ``` When I run this script, I get the output I expect, but if there are multiline matches (for example, if a line ends with a backslash), parts of those matches seem to get lost. Instead of capturing complete lines, it only captures the first segment before a newline in cases where the line wraps. I've even tried adjusting the `IFS` variable, but that didn't help. When I debug the script, I notice that only the first line of multiline matches gets stored in the array and subsequent lines are ignored, leading to incomplete data. I've tried iterating over the results using a different approach, like using `mapfile`, but that also yields similar issues. Is there a recommended way to handle multiline output in this context, or am I missing something in my current approach? Any help would be greatly appreciated! This is part of a larger API I'm building. Thanks in advance! I'm working on a service that needs to handle this. Am I missing something obvious? I'm on Debian using the latest version of Bash. Thanks in advance! I'm developing on Ubuntu 20.04 with Bash. I appreciate any insights! Has anyone dealt with something similar? I'm on Windows 11 using the latest version of Bash. Is this even possible? What would be the recommended way to handle this?