Does bash support doing a read nested within a read loop?

Question

The bash read command is very convenient for:

• read -p to prompt the user and capture input from the user
• while read loop to iterate through the lines of a file.

However, I'm having issues attempting to do both simultaneously.

For example:

#!/bin/bash

while read item
do
    echo Item: $item
    read -p "choose wisely: " choice
    echo You still have made a $choice.
done < /tmp/item.list 

Rather than blocking and standing by for the user to enter a choice, bash is populating $choice with the next item in the item.list file.

Does bash support doing a read nested within a read loop?

Answer 1

The simplest fix is to have the outer read read from a different file descriptor instead of standard input. In Bash, the -u option make that a little easier.

while read -u 3 item
do
  # other stuff
  read -p "choose wisely: " choice
  # other stuff
done 3< /tmp/item.list