Capturing output of asynchronous bash commands?

Question

Is it possible to do something like this in bash?

output=$(echo hello; sleep 10) &
pid=$!
# run some more commands
wait $pid
echo $output

I would like to run multiple commands in parallel, capturing their output. I'd like to do it in a "clean" way - not writing to temporary files etc.

Answer 1

You can use a named pipe to communicate between parent and child, see man mkfifo for details. Parent can use read command to fetch data from the pipe.