READ(1) General Commands Manual READ(1)

read — read a line from standard input

read [-r] var...

The read utility shall read a single line from standard input.

By default, unless the -r option is specified, backslash ( ‘\’ ) shall act as an escape character, as described in xcu_chap02(1). If standard input is a terminal device and the invoking shell is interactive, read shall prompt for a continuation line when:

  • The shell reads an input line ending with a backslash, unless the -r option is specified.
  • A here-document is not terminated after a <newline> is entered.

The line shall be split into fields as in the shell (see xcu_chap02(1)); the first field shall be assigned to the first variable var, the second field to the second variable var, and so on. If there are fewer var operands specified than there are fields, the leftover fields and their intervening separators shall be assigned to the last var. If there are fewer fields than var s, the remaining var s shall be set to empty strings.

The setting of variables specified by the var operands shall affect the current shell execution environment; see xcu_chap02(1). If it is called in a subshell or separate utility execution environment, such as one of the following:

(read foo)
nohup read ...
find . -exec read ... \;

it shall not affect the shell variables in the caller's environment.

The read utility shall conform to the Base Definitions volume of IEEE Std 1003.1-2001 (“POSIX.1”), xbd_chap12(7).

The following option is supported:

Do not treat a backslash character in any special way. Consider each backslash to be part of the input line.

The following operand shall be supported:

var
The name of an existing or nonexisting shell variable.

The standard input shall be a text file.

None.

The following environment variables shall affect the execution of read:

Determine the internal field separators used to delimit fields; see .
Provide a default value for the internationalization variables that are unset or null. (See the Base Definitions volume of IEEE Std 1003.1-2001 (“POSIX.1”), Section 8.2, Internationalization Variables for the precedence of internationalization variables used to determine the values of locale categories.)
If set to a non-empty string value, override the values of all the other internationalization variables.
Determine the locale for the interpretation of sequences of bytes of text data as characters (for example, single-byte as opposed to multi-byte characters in arguments).
Determine the locale that should be used to affect the format and contents of diagnostic messages written to standard error.
[ XSI] Determine the location of message catalogs for the processing of LC_MESSAGES .
Provide the prompt string that an interactive shell shall write to standard error when a line ending with a backslash is read and the -r option was not specified, or if a here-document is not terminated after a <newline> is entered.

Default.

Not used.

The standard error shall be used for diagnostic messages and prompts for continued input.

None.

None.

The following exit values shall be returned:

Successful completion.
End-of-file was detected or an error occurred.

Default.

The -r option is included to enable read to subsume the purpose of the utility, which is not included in IEEE Std 1003.1-2001 (“POSIX.1”).

The results are undefined if an end-of-file is detected following a backslash at the end of a line when -r is not specified.

The following command:

while read -r xx yy
do
    printf "%s %s\n" "$yy" "$xx"
done < input_file

prints a file with the first field of each line moved to the end of the line.

The read utility historically has been a shell built-in. It was separated off into its own utility to take advantage of the richer description of functionality introduced by this volume of IEEE Std 1003.1-2001 (“POSIX.1”).

Since read affects the current shell execution environment, it is generally provided as a shell regular built-in. If it is called in a subshell or separate utility execution environment, such as one of the following:

(read foo)
nohup read ...
find . -exec read ... \;

it does not affect the shell variables in the environment of the caller.

None.

xcu_chap02(1)

First released in Issue 2.

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January 1, 2004 posix.fail