How to capture subshell exit code when assigning subshell output to read?

Question

Consider:

$ read -r a <<<$(echo "foo"; exit 1)
$ echo $?
0

this returns 0, when I really expect a 1. How can I extract the real exit code from the subshell?

Answer 1

You'll need multiple steps:

output=$(echo "foo"; exit 1)
status=$?
read -r a <<<"$output"       # assuming the "real" code here is more complex