stream of output into a stream of variables

Question

I have two queries that I am running against two different systems. They each return one row, and I want to output them on a single line.

if the queries produce results similar to:

echo this that and more
echo other great news

I want to be able to do some reordering and formatting like so:

echo other this that great news and more 

If I could figure out how to echo the output of the line into multiple variables I would be good. I got this to work:

echo this that and more | while IFS=" ", read a b c
do
  echo a=$a b=$b c=$c
done 

But once I am out of the while loop the variables a b and c are out of scope and no longer have their values.

Answer 1

It's not that they are out of scope, ksh (at least the AT&T version) doesn't have that limitation of bash. It's that read is called twice.

The second time is the one where it fails and gets you out of the loop.

As that second read reads nothing, it sets a, b and c to the empty string.

Just do:

echo this that and more | IFS=" " read a b c
echo "a=$a b=$b c=$c"

Answer 2

a=$(echo this...)
b=$(echo other...)
echo -- "$a $b"