How to initialize a bash array with output piped from another command? [duplicate]

Question

Is there any way to pipe the output of a command which lists a bunch of numbers (each number in a separate line) and initialize a bash array with those numbers?

Details: This lists 3 changelist numbers which have been submitted in the following date range. The output is then piped to cut to filter it further to get just the changelist numbers.

p4 changes -m 3 -u edk -s submitted @2009/05/01,@now | cut -d ' ' -f 2 

E.g. :

422311 543210 444000 

How is it possible to store this list in a bash array?

Answer 1

You can execute the command under ticks and set the Array like,

ARRAY=(`command`) 

Alternatively, you can save the output of the command to a file and cat it similarly,

command > file.txt ARRAY=(`cat file.txt`) 

Or, simply one of the following forms suggested in the comments below,

ARRAY=(`< file.txt`) ARRAY=($(<file.txt)) 

Answer 2

If you use bash 4+, it has special command for this: mapfile also known as readarray, so you can fill your array like this:

declare -a a readarray -t a < <(command) 

for more portable version you can use

declare -a a while read i; do   a=( "${a[@]}" "$i" ) done < <(command)