Assign and use of a variable in the same subshell

Question

I was doing something very simple like: v=5 echo \"$v\" and expected it to print 5. However, it does not. The value that was just set is not availa

Answer 1

v=5 echo $v

will add v=5 into the environment variables and then execute echo $v. The $v refers to the shell variable v which you have set to 1 in the first line.

Adding the semi colon v=5;echo $v sets the shell variable to 5 and then executes the command after the semi-colon ie echo $v and produces 5.

Try this command:

v=5 env|less

and look at the environment.