Why is “echo foo | read a ; echo $a” not working as expected?

Question

I could replicate the problem with various shells under FreeBSD, GNU/Linux, and Solaris. It had me head-scratching for more than an hour, so I decided to post the question here

Answer 1

alternative:

echo foo | (read a ; echo $a)

Edit:

If you need $a outside the subshell, you have to reverse the commands:

read a < <(echo foo); echo $a

this way the read is executed in the current process

Answer 2

I came up with a solution that doesn't hide the variable values in a subshell, and that can also work with multiple values.

set `echo foo bar`
A=$1
B=$2