Is this bash argument substitution?

Question

While studying bash process substitution, I found this:

counter=0

while IFS= read -rN1 _; do
    ((counter++))
done < <(find /etc -printf ' ')

echo "$counter files"

If I understand correctly, the output of find command substitutes the "_".

However:

• Which mechanism is this?
• Additionally: what does read -rN1 do?

Update:

Additional question: The process substitution is pointing to the "done" in the while loop. How does this work, i.e., why would the while loop take a substitution at that place. Is there any thing general I can read about?

Answer 1

<(find /etc -printf ' ') is called "process substitution". It will generate one character (an space ' ') per each file. The output of find /etc -printf ' ' is made available in a file (or something that appears as a file). The name of this file is expanded on the command line. The additional < performs the redirection for stdin from that file.

read -rN1 _ reads from (the redirected) stdin into a variable called _, one character at a time, and count those characters (which each represent one file).

Here are the read arguments from man bash:

-r     Backslash  does not act as an escape character.  The backslash is considered
       to be part of the line.  In particular, a backslash-newline pair may not  be
       used as a line continuation.

-N nchars
       read returns after reading exactly nchars characters rather than waiting for
       a  complete  line  of  input,  unless  EOF is encountered or read times out.
       Delimiter characters encountered in the input are not treated specially  and
       do not cause read to return until nchars characters are read.