bash concatenate string in loop results in empty string

I have the following file

Hello
World
my
name
is
FalcoGer

And I wish to concatenate the strings of each line.

I wrote the following script to do just that.

#! /usr/bin/bash
myFile=/home/FalcoGer/testfile.txt
result=""
cat $myFile | while read line
do result+="$line "
done
echo Result: $result

However I only get Result: with an empty string. When I print it from within the loop it seems to work just fine. What's wrong with this script and how do I fix it?

1 Answer

Using the pipe essentially creates a new script with a new scope. You can avoid the pipe like so:

#! /usr/bin/bash
myFile=/home/FalcoGer/testfile.txt
result=""
while read -r line
do result+="$line "
done < $myFile
echo Result: $result