environment scope in loop (for vs. while)

Question

I want to source files in a directory, I tried to make it work with this loop :

ls -1 $HOME/.bash_complete.d |while read f; do
    . $HOME/.bash_complete.d/$f
done

though the scripts seem to be executed, any export foo=bar in those are not present in env

Its for counterpart below :

for f in $HOME/.bash_complete.d/*; do
    . $f
done

works as I expect. Is there a scope involved ?

score 1 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 12:23

1

See http://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashFAQ/024 and the answer to Bash Script: While-Loop Subshell Dilemma (which this question is a duplicate of), everything in the while loop is executed in a subshell, so it has it's own scope. variables declared in this scope will not be visible from outside the scope.

edited May 23 '17 at 12:23

Community

1
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answered Dec 04 '15 at 13:58

glenda

58
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nu11p01n73R · Answer 2 · 2014-10-12T19:44:32.307

0

The -l is not required, which gives a long listing of the files. All that is required is the name of the files, which can be obtained by a simple ls command

ls $HOME/.bash_complete.d |while read f; do
    echo $HOME/.bash_complete.d/$f
    $HOME/.bash_complete.d/$f
done

edited Oct 12 '14 at 19:44

answered Oct 12 '14 at 19:37

nu11p01n73R

26,397
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it's a -1 (one), and executing the files without `source` does nothing – r---------k Oct 12 '14 at 19:57
isnt it `. $f` instead of `. $HOME/.bash_complete.d/$f` – nu11p01n73R Oct 12 '14 at 20:05

environment scope in loop (for vs. while)

2 Answers2