Shell script: function doesn't set global variable when piped

Question

Hey there, just started to play around with some bash scripting and I bumped into this issue today.
My code:
#!/bin/sh
MY_VAR=0
echo "First: $MY_VAR"
my_func() {
MY_VAR=1
my_func | grep "Fail"
echo "Pipe: $MY_VAR"
my_func
echo "Func: $MY_VAR"
Result:
First: 0
Pipe: 0
Func: 1
I assume that bash is starting a subshell to run my function when piping the result to grep. Is there any way to set the variable and pipe the output at the same time?

Answer 1

Thanks, that does confirm why it doesn't work as expected. At the moment my only solution is something along the lines of:
#!/bin/sh
MY_VAR=0
my_func() {
MY_VAR=1
#echo "Some Text"
MY_OUTPUT="Text that I was going to echo"
my_func
echo $MY_OUTPUT | grep "Text"
This sets MY_VAR to 1 as expected and I can still pipe the output to some other application but it looks awfully hackish, not to mention that it requires me to change every 'echo' to some var...
If anyone comes up with a better solution I'll be glad to hear it.