Bash Shell Newlines – How to Preserve Newline Character in Command Output

Got the answer:

$ read IPETH0 IPLO <<< $(ifconfig | awk '/inet[[:space:]]/ { print $2 }' | cut -d ':' -f 2)
$ echo "${IPETH0}"
192.168.23.2
$ echo "${IPLO}"
127.0.0.1

This assumes the order of the eth0 and lo interfaces, but it shows the basic idea.

Pure awk

You can do this exclusively in awk using the split function:

$ read IPETH0 IPLO <<< $(ifconfig | awk '/inet[[:space:]]/ { split($2,a,":"); print a[2]}')

After the substition happens (which BTW in POSIX could only target the left side before any ">") there is no more evaluation on whether there is any ">" so the approach you envisioned wouldn't work.

If you don't care about POSIX-conformity (after all you tagged this as 'bash') you could still find a solution by dynamically setting the right side but I would personally go for a totally different approach; have a look at the following post detailing a verbose/silent mode based on custom file descriptors: https://stackoverflow.com/a/20942015/2261442.

A code excerpt from that post to show how nice it would then look like:

# Some confirmations:
printf "%s\n" "This message is seen at verbosity level 3 and above." >&3
printf "%s\n" "This message is seen at verbosity level 4 and above." >&4
printf "%s\n" "This message is seen at verbosity level 5 and above." >&5