bash redirecting EOF into variable [duplicate]

Answer 1

What you call "EOF" can be googled as Here Document. Here Document can only be used to feed the standard input of a command. The below example does what you want without spawning child processes

#!/bin/bash

multilineconcat=
while read line; do
  #echo $line
  multilineconcat+=$line
  multilineconcat+=":"
done << EOF
path1
path2
EOF

echo $multilineconcat