Getting a Bourne shell “here document” into a shell variable

Just use read with a heredoc. read is a Bash builtin so no process needs to be forked.

https://github.com/helpermethod/up/blob/master/src/.bash_fun...

Once I found myself doing this, I switched to Python and never looked back.

A discussion¹ of an earlier related post² from the same author brings up a lot of the — sometimes subtle — problems with relying on here documents/strings in shell scripts.

¹ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29845232

² https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/ProcessSubstit...