Thanks for the quick response.

cube@cubidou.net writes:
 > Using a pipe here means you're launching the while loop in a sub-shell.
 > Hence, $LIST inside the loop is not the same as the external $LIST, and
 > get lost when the sub-shell exits.

I knew it was something obvious that I wasn't seeing.

 > The 'cat -' here is really useless, just remove it and 'read' will take
 > its input from the standard input anyway.

In "real life" I'm not use cat.  The loop is the end of a pipeline,
though, so cat served that purpose here.

 > If you really need a cat here, you'll have to make the sub-shell return
 > a value on the standard output, and assign it, or something like that.

So LIST=$(<contents of pipeline with loop>) works fine.

Thanks.

Cheers,
Brook