A variable modified inside a while loop is not remembered

Question

In the following program, if I set the variable $foo to the value 1 inside the first if statement, it works in the sense that its value is remember

Answer 1

Though this is an old question and asked several times, here's what I'm doing after hours fidgeting with here strings, and the only option that worked for me is to store the value in a file during while loop sub-shells and then retrieve it. Simple.

Use echo statement to store and cat statement to retrieve. And the bash user must chown the directory or have read-write chmod access.

#write to file
echo "1" > foo.txt

while condition; do 
    if (condition); then
        #write again to file
        echo "2" > foo.txt      
    fi
done

#read from file
echo "Value of \$foo in while loop body: $(cat foo.txt)"