On Sat, Jan 07, 2017 at 09:54:34PM +0100, foo fighter wrote: > In jessie "version 1" and "version 2" behave identical. In stretch, "version > 2" behaves different (only one item in array)
> echo "===========================Version 2===========================" [...] > _inputstring="$(echo -e "item01\nitem02\nitem03")" _inputstring=$'item01\nitem02\nitem03' > read -ra _array <<<$(echo "$_inputstring") # <<< WITH -"- around string This is just wrong. You're using $(echo) which is silly and pointless, and you've failed to quote the result, and you've failed to tell read not to stop reading at the first newline, and you've failed to set IFS to use only newlines as delimiters between array elements. The only way yours "works" at all is because two of your errors are canceling each other. The unquoted $(echo) is doing word splitting and then reassembling the result, effectively replacing each newline with a space, so that you only have a single line of input, which is why read sees the entire input.... Yikes. Really, you should be using mapfile (a.k.a. readarray) when reading a multi-line input where each line is intended to become one array element. _inputstring=$'item01\nitem02\nitem03' mapfile -t _array <<< "$_inputstring" declare -p _array Try that in both versions of bash, and I believe that it will work consistently and correctly. Now I get to start guessing. My first guess is that you are doing something like this: tmp=$(some program that writes multiple lines) read -ra array <<< $(echo "tmp") # wrong Just do this instead: mapfile -t array < <(some program that writes multiple lines)
