In shell scripting how to use read in echo

read by default reads words from its input into variables.

`cmd`, the ancient form of $(...) captures the output of a command. By default, read doesn't produce any output. The text you see when you type something to be read by read is the echo of the terminal device, it's not output by read¹.

Some read implementations can output what they read. For instance, zsh's read builtin can do that with -e or -E (the latter to also store the input in variables in addition to echoing it back).

So in zsh:

echo "my name is=$(read -e) and am from $(read -e)"

Portably, you can read a line of input (as opposed to the special reading behaviour of read) and output it back with head -n1. However note that if standard input is not a terminal device or a seekable file, most head implementations would read more than one line.

Many systems also still have a line command for that (used to be standard, later deprecated).

echo "my name is=$(line) and am from $(line)"

Which should read one byte at a time, so not read more than one line of input.

If not available, you can always emulate that line with read:

line() {
  IFS= read -r line
  ret=$?
  printf '%s\n' "$line" || return "$ret"
}

Or even make it a

prompt() {
  printf >&2 %s "$1"
  IFS= read -r answer
  printf '%s\n' "$answer"
}

printf '%s\n' "my name is=$(
  prompt "What is your name? ") and am from $(
  prompt "Where are you from? ")"

(here using printf instead of echo as echo can generally not be used for arbitrary data).

(same as zsh's IFS= read -re '?What is your name? ').

For completeness, with csh or tcsh, you can do:

printf '%s\n' "my name is=$< and am from $<"

$< being csh's way to read input into a variable.

If you wanted to repeat that for every two lines of input, it would be better to use a text processing utility like awk:

awk '{name=$0; getline place; print "my name is="name" and am from "place}'

¹ unless read is configured to implement a line editor by itself like with read -e in bash or by setting the emacs, gmacs or vi option in ksh93 (and stdin is a terminal device), but then read would output the echo on stderr, not stdout.