How to avoid subshell behaviour using while and fi

Question

This question already has an answer here:

• While-loop subshell dilemma in Bash 3 answers

Because I trapped into this myself, I asked a question and did give also the answer here. If find iterates over what the command did find, this is executed from bash in a subshell. So you can not fill an array with results and use it after your loop.

Answer 1

You have to change the syntax from:

i=0
find $cont_dirs_abs -type l -exec test -e {} \; -print0 | while IFS= read -r -d '' lxc_storage_abspath; do
    lxcname=${lxc_storage_abspath##*/}
    ...
    lxcnames[$i]="$lxcname"
    let "i+=1"
done

to

i=0
while IFS= read -r -d '' lxc_storage_abspath; do
    lxcname=${lxc_storage_abspath##*/}
    ...
    lxcnames[$i]="$lxcname"
    let "i+=1"
done < <(find $cont_dirs_abs -type l -exec test -e {} \; -print0)

In my case i can after this loop access the bash array $lxcnames:

i=0
for lxcname in ${lxcnames[*]}; do
    ...
done

Hope that helps anybody.