Shell Programming and Scripting

True. I've just tried to stay as close as possible to OP's idea.

From $10 on, it starts to produce wrong output and more than 10 values are quite realistic here.
Although, this can be circumvented by using curly brackets, eg.

Code:

echo ${10}
echo ${11}
...

I see, OK. I highlighted it because the OP's loop idea wasn't working. Because the variable reference "${returnedvalues}" is used quoted, the echo will produce multiline output. So it would need to be an unquoted variable reference ${returnedvalues} with a single read. A while loop would have not function.

And it is masking an underlying problem.

Supposed if he had catered for multiline output, for example:

Code:

i=0
echo "${returnedvalues}" | 
while read val[i++] do
  :
done

He would not be able use all the array values inside the loop since they are only all set until after the last iteration.
He could not use the values after the loop either, since they will be gone after the while loop, as - in bash - that part is run in a subshell.

With curly braces he could retain those values

Code:

i=0
echo "${returnedvalues}" | 
{
  while read val[i++] do
    :
  done
  echo ${val[0]}
  echo ${val[1]} 
}

In short, a while loop had no function there, other than to act as curly braces, and that only happens to work if there is a single read. So the while loop is used, but it is not really used as one, which makes the code harder to read and understand IMO.

Yes correct, from 10 on you need to use the curly braces..