read(1)

NAME
read - read line of input into variables

  Synopsis
read [OPTIONS] [VARIABLES...]

  Description
read reads one line from standard input and stores the result in one or more environment variables.

The following options are available:

•   -c CMD or --command=CMD sets the initial string in the interactive mode command buffer to CMD.

•   -g or --global makes the variables global (default behaviour).

•   -l or --local makes the variables local.

•   -m NAME or --mode-name=NAME specifies that the name NAME should be used to save/load the history file. If NAME is fish, the regular fish history will be available.

•   -p PROMPT_CMD or --prompt=PROMPT_CMD uses the output of the shell command PROMPT_CMD as the prompt for the interactive mode. The default prompt command is set_color green; echo read; set_color normal; echo '> '.

•   -s or --shell enables syntax highlighting, tab completions and command termination suitable for entering shellscript code in the interactive mode.

•   -u or --unexport prevents the variables from being exported to child processes (default behaviour).

•   -U or --universal causes the specified environment variable to be made universal.

•   -x or --export exports the variables to child processes.

read reads a single line of input from stdin, breaks it into tokens based on the IFS environment variable, and then assigns one token to each variable specified in VARIABLES. If there are more tokens than variables, the complete remainder is assigned to the last variable.

  Example
The following code stores the value 'hello' in the environment variable $foo.

echo hello|read foo