How to use the read command in Bash?

Question

When I try to use the read command in Bash like this:

echo hello | read str
echo $str

Nothing echoed, while I think str<

Answer 1

To put my two cents here: on KSH, reading as is to a variable will work, because according to the IBM AIX documentation, KSH's read does affects the current shell environment:

The setting of shell variables by the read command affects the current shell execution environment.

This just resulted in me spending a good few minutes figuring out why a one-liner ending with read that I've used a zillion times before on AIX didn't work on Linux... it's because KSH does saves to the current environment and BASH doesn't!