Re: redirecting a file descriptor to an array variable? Possible? How? RFE?

[Linda Walsh]

Greg Wooledge wrote:
> You should stop using irrelevant examples, and return to your core
> question.  I believe your initial goal was to run a command, and capture
> the command's stdout in one variable, and the command's stderr in another
> variable, without using any temp files.
----
        Actually, wanted them already line split  into 2 arrays.

        That's why I didn't care too much if the lines were separated
by NUL's instead of NL's.



> Come up with some syntax 
----
        The syntax isn't the hard part -- really, I think there are several
formats that could be used that wouldn't conflict w/current uses.

        I'm more interested in some of the features...like the ability
to separate input datums w/NUL's read by readAR/mapfl seems perfect for this
type of thing.

        The opposite side -- printing things out with a nul or NUL-sep
is missing -- but WOULDN'T be missing if bash's implementation followed
the man page.

I.e. If "$v" could really store '"\x00"\n', then another huge lump would
"go away".

> I would steer away from >&punc where "punc" is some third punctuation
> characters.  We already have >&word for FD duplication and closing,
> where "word" can be an integer FD to duplicate, or - to mean close.

---
Except that would be the wrong thing to do.

You have:
1) optional 'fd' to work with -- that, currently has to be blank or evaluate to 
an integer; so (after quote removal) it has to start with [$0-9].

2) "direction": into something (<); out of something (>);
a not-so-useful way to open a file with RW access(<>) (but no way to 
seek, skip, truncate or use use mapfile/readarray because
of the embedded nul problem;  the "through" something (|).

3) then comes the 2nd operand which says "word", but where is
'word' defined.  Is that any varname or funcname or alias name? 
Words normally don't start with "$" though varnames do.
Words, also, don't normally start with '(' but a subprocess 
can -- e.g. process substitution).

Since you are wanting to retain field '1' and field '2', it seems
a specification for '3' indicating array usage  would be a perfect
fit for the language... Since '@' is already used as a subscript meaning
all of an array -- using '@' before a 'word'  would store multiple,
separated, 'lines' as members in the array specified by 'word' & after the
'@'.

Something that parallels the syntax would be a better solution, I 
believe,  than coming up with something that looked entirely unrelated,
no?