Bash: I have a variable in bash script;

Question

I have a variable in bash script dirs= "4"; I want to get this number from another file so I am using a command dirs= sed -n '1p' < test.txt; It gets me the number, I see it in the terminal. But Later in the code, I want to use a loop for dir in dirs.. it does not work because in the script it does not understand that dir is number.

d= sed -n '1p' < test.txt
for dirs in $d    
do
  echo "$dirs"
done
dirs= read $dirs

speeds= sed -n '2p' < test.txt 

for speeds in $s    
do
  echo "$speeds"
done
for dir in $dirs
do
  for speed in $speeds
  do
    echo "speed=$speed   dir=$dir"
done
done

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Apr 10 '19 at 15:14

You need to use: speeds=$(sed -n '2p' < test.txt)

What's actually happening is bash sees that space and treats speeds= and sed... as different commands. So it sets speeds to the empty string and then runs sed (which is why you see the value being printed when you run the script: it's being printed to the terminal instead of being saved to the variable). You need to wrap the sed command in $( ) to get it to run in a subshell and return the output; then remove that space after = to get it assigned to the variable you want.

Bash: I have a variable in bash script;

1 Answers1