Karim Vaes

When setting/changing variables within the scope of a subshell. And then attempt to use those variables outside the scope of this subshell won’t give the ‘expected result’.
A subshell has to be seen as a totally seperate process with it’s own environment.
(check a previous entry about processes)

Now the above might seem logical: Subshell, seperate process, … okay. Let’s say you want to pipe the output of a certain command thru a loop. In this loop you can manipulate/filter/… the data. In some cases you might want to set a flag if a certain criteria is met. Here is where it all comes into play. When you pipe an output to any kind of loop, it’ll become a subshell.

So as you might have guessed. The flag you wanted to set won’t cross it’s subshell borders. So you won’t be able to see it outside the loop. And yet again, an output that you might not have expected.

More info about “bash gotchas” can be found here