I’m trying to parse what you wrote and it isn’t working well. Your first example “without cat” is just my example above, and the second one does nothing to read a file, it will just stall waiting for stdin.

Commands like:

cat file.txt|while read line; do echo “${line}”; done
while read line; do echo “${line}”; done < <(cat file.lst)

are wrong because they use cat.

Here is a better form WITHOUT cat:

while read line; do echo "${line}"; done cat file.txt | while read line; do echo $line; myvar=”i am set”; done
This is the file contents
myuser@myhost ~> echo $myvar

myuser@myhost ~> while read line; do echo $line; myvar=”i am set”; done echo $myvar
i am set

Despite contacting QNAP in response to the above comment, twice now, I never did receive a response from them.

Anton