Accessing local variable

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

Hi,

Would like to know the purpose and accessing of local variable as in below code snippet:

a=123
( a=321; )	      

echo "a = $a"   #This will print 123

How to access local a variable which is assigned with value 321 ?. ..

2

The short answer: Like this, you can't.

From the BASH man-page:

(list) list  is executed in a subshell environment

a=123
( a=321;
  echo "a = $a"   #This will print 321
)
3

Okay. ..

Any purpose behind it?. .. Or it is like a dummy value assigned to some orbitery variable?.

Thank you.

4

purpose willbe, If you want to do some calculation on same variable which is used by parent shell and don't want to replace the value of parent shell variable.

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