Reading Multiple Lines of a File then setting each line to a different variable

Question

I'm writing a bash script and I am reading in a file with 3 lines each with only 1 number. I have to set each line to a new variable. I'm not quite sure how to do this but this is what I am doing now:

    VAR1=0
    VAR2=0
    VAR3=0

    while read line
    do
            VAR1=$line
            VAR2=$line
            VAR3=$line
    done <$FILE

The result I'm getting is just the last line in the file for all 3 variables. Any help yould be great.

Answer 1

Believe it or not, you can do this using printf

i=0
while read line; do
  ((i++))
  varname="VAR$i"
  printf -v $varname "$line"
done < FILE

Source: Creating a string variable name from the value of another string

Answer 2

Nosid's answer does what you want, but if you really needed an array, you can do it like this:

# populate ARRAY
ARRAY=()
while read LINE
do
    ARRAY+=("$LINE")
done < test

# subscripting
echo ${ARRAY[0]}
echo ${ARRAY[1]}
echo ${ARRAY[2]}

# looping
for LINE in "${ARRAY[@]}"
do
    echo "$LINE"
done

Answer 3

This might work for you (BASH):

OIFS=$IFS; IFS=$'\n'; var=($(<file)); IFS=$OIFS
for ((n=0;n<${#var[@]};n++)){ echo "\${var[$n]}=${var[n]}"; }

Answer 4

My personal solution is slightly different and can be used in a pipe.

This works if you know that output will be divided every N lines (2 for this case)

YOUR_COMAND | while read line; 
do
  ((i++))
  lines[i]=$line
  if [ $i = 2 ]; then       
    echo "You received new output: ${lines[1]} ${lines[2]}"   

    #do your stuff with all the lines you gathered

    i=0;
  fi      
done