Re: Redirect to variable

[Robert Durkacz]

On 5/21/18 Chet Ramey wrote:


> What you're asking for is syntactic sugar for:

> some-command > temp-file
> echo '#' >> temp-file
> variablename=$(< temp-file)
> rm -f temp-file
> variablename=${variablename%?}

> I would look at a sample implementation, possibly using mmap, if someone
did one.

Could someone please explain the reason for inserting and removing the #
character. It is as if to ensure temp-file is non-empty but it seems to me
it would work anyway.