What is the POSIX shell equivalent of bash <<<

Question

I have a variable that looks sort of like this:

msg="newton apple tree"

I want to assign each of these words into separate variables. This is easy to do in bash:

read a b c <<< $msg

Is there a compact, readable way to do this in POSIX shell?

Answer 1

A here string is just syntactic sugar for a single-line here document:

$ msg="foo * bar"
$ read a b c <<EOF
> $msg
> EOF
$ echo "$a"
foo
$ echo "$b"
*
$ echo "$c"
bar

Answer 2

To write idiomatic scripts, you can't just look at each individual syntax element and try to find a POSIX equivalent. That's like translating text by replacing each individual word with its entry in the dictionary.

The POSIX way of splitting a string known to have three words into three arguments, similar but not identical to read is:

var="newton apple tree"

set -f
set -- $var
set +f
a=$1 b=$2 c=$3

echo "$a was hit by an $b under a $c"