read(1) 						      General Commands Manual							   read(1)

NAME

       read - Reads a line from standard input

SYNOPSIS

       read [-r] var...

STANDARDS

       Interfaces documented on this reference page conform to industry standards as follows:

       read:  XCU5.0

       Refer to the standards(5) reference page for more information about industry standards and associated tags.

OPTIONS

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

									      Note

	      The -r option is included to enable read to subsume the purpose of the obsolete line utility.

OPERANDS

       The name of an existing or non-existing shell variable.

DESCRIPTION

       The read utility reads a single line from standard input.

       By  default,  unless the -r option is specified, backslash () acts as an escape character.  If standard input is a terminal device and the
       invoking shell is interactive, read prompts for a continuation line in the following cases: 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 character is entered.

       The  line  is  split into fields as in the shell (see the sh(1) reference page); the first field is assigned to the first variable var, the
       second field to the second variable var, and so forth.  If there are fewer var parameters specified than there  are  fields,  the  leftover
       fields  and  their intervening separators are assigned to the last var.	If there are fewer fields than vars, the remaining vars are set to
       empty strings.

       The setting of variables specified by the var parameters affects the current shell execution environment.  If read is called in a  subshell
       or  separate  utility  execution environment, such as one of the following, it does not affect the shell variables in the caller's environ-
       ment:

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

NOTES

       The -r option is included to enable read to subsume the purpose of the obsolete line utility.

RESTRICTIONS

       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.

EXIT STATUS

       The following exit values are returned: Successful completion.  End-of-file was detected or an error occurred.

EXAMPLES

       The following command prints a file with the first field of each line moved to the end of the line:

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

ENVIRONMENT VARIABLES

       The following environment variables affect the execution of read: Determines the internal field separators used to  delimit  fields.   Pro-
       vides  a  default  value  for the internationalization variables that are unset or null.  If LANG is unset or null, the corresponding value
       from the default locale is used.  If any of the internationalization variables contain an invalid setting, the utility behaves as  if  none
       of  the	variables  had been defined.  If set to a non-empty string value, overrides the values of all the other internationalization vari-
       ables.  Determines the locale for the interpretation of sequences of bytes of text data as characters (for example, single-byte as  opposed
       to  multibyte  characters  in  arguments).   Determines the locale used to affect the format and contents of diagnostic messages written to
       standard error.	Determines the location of message catalogues for the processing of LC_MESSAGES.   Provides  the  prompt  string  that	an
       interactive  shell  will  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 character is entered.

SEE ALSO

       Commands:  line(1)

       Functions:  fread(3)

       Standards:  standards(5)

																	   read(1)