Mailing-List: contact cygwin-help AT cygwin DOT com; run by ezmlm List-Subscribe: List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: , Sender: cygwin-owner AT cygwin DOT com Mail-Followup-To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com Delivered-To: mailing list cygwin AT cygwin DOT com Date: Thu, 16 Dec 2004 15:40:05 -0500 From: Christopher Faylor To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com Subject: Re: Piping output from sqlplus Message-ID: <20041216204005.GA26201@trixie.casa.cgf.cx> Reply-To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com References: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: User-Agent: Mutt/1.4.1i On Thu, Dec 16, 2004 at 03:29:16PM -0500, Chuck wrote: >I'm having a strange problem reading the output from sqlplus in Cygwin. >Sqlplus is a windows command line program used to access oracle >databases. My command looks something like this... > >sqlplus -s <user/password AT database >set pagesize 0 linesize 200 feedback off tab off >select col1||chr(9)||col2 >from table; >! > >This should output one line to stdout with the two values separated by a >tab character. The read command should read it into the variable $line. >On my Solaris system it works perfectly. In Cygwin, $line is empty. Just to demonstrate what you're seeing without the sqlplus requirement: bash$ echo hello | read line bash$ echo $line bash$ The reason for the behavior is apparently that when you use read in a pipe like this bash and ash fork a separate process so the variable only exists very briefly in that process and `line' is never defined in the main process. zsh does what you'd expect, so if you can use zsh instead of bash, that would be a solution. Otherwise, you probably will have to experiment with setting IFS and using either $(sqlplus) or `sqlplus` . cgf -- Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/