I know there are caveats about using read in pipelines because read is treated by a subshell. I know this but I can't think of any way to accomplish this regardless, I'm still a rookie.

I hope somebody will be able to interpret what it is that I'm trying to accomplish and correct me.

gist, trying to use output from command:

$ date -u '+%d %h %y' <enter>
05 Jan 09

##want to store 05 Jan 09 to variables DAY MONTH YEAR respectively; also want Jan to be all caps, so tr is used in pipeline##

$ date -u '+%d %h %y' | tr '[:lower:]' '[:upper:]' <enter>
05 JAN 09

##okay, so I got desired format for output, now I want those values stored, so just add a read command statement with the day month year as operands, right??##

$ date -u '+%d %h %y' | tr '[:lower:]' '[:upper:]' | read DAY MONTH YEAR <enter>
$ echo $DAY

$

##var DAY carries empty value--what am I doing wrong or what would be the correct way to achieve desired result of storing 05 JAN 09 output of date/tr commands to those variables??##

thanks in advance

I could able to result $DAY as "05" from the above command. I have no issues with it.

by the way, it is a known caveat that you can't use read in a pipeline, because of the way read is called in a subshell. Effectively the values stored to the named variables in read will only be stored in the subshell and not the parent.

I realized why it worked for you. Apparently the $-prompt for bourne and korn shell is the same. I was attempting to do the aforementioned in bourne and I suspected because of what I stated about the parent-child relationship of read when called in a shell, that possibly you were using a shell which compensated for this deficiency. suspected bash at first but obviously korn.

Will try to work it out from here, but thanks for your feedback anyway, bobby. I hope this helps others.