Bash export variables received lines by lines

Question

I got a simple problem but very boring.

The goal is to write a shell script that run on EC2 instance to exports tags for rest of the script... Something like:

ec2-describe-tags [...]
    | while IFS=':' read name value; do
        export "$name"="$value"
    done

Not so uggly but don't work, of course cause the export is in the while loop, executed in pipe.

My question is: how to write this correctly? Of course I cannot predict names nor numbers of received tags.

Answer 1

Try this:

while IFS=: read name value; do
    export $name="$value"
done < <(ec2-describe-instance ...)

A pipeline runs the commands in a subshell, so the variables don't persist when it's done.