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How to set a variable to the output of a command in Bash?
13 answers
I have a problem putting the content of pwd
command into a shell variable that I'll use later.
Here is my shell code (the loop doesn't stop):
#!/bin/bash
pwd= `pwd`
until [ $pwd = "/" ]
do
echo $pwd
ls && cd .. && ls
$pwd= `pwd`
done
Could you spot my mistake, please?
Try:
pwd=`pwd`
or
pwd=$(pwd)
Notice no spaces after the equals sign.
Also as Mr. Weiss points out; you don't assign to $pwd
, you assign to pwd
.
In shell you assign to a variable without the dollar-sign:
TEST=`pwd`
echo $TEST
that's better (and can be nested) but is not as portable as the backtics:
TEST=$(pwd)
echo $TEST
Always remember: the dollar-sign is only used when reading a variable.
In this specific case, note that bash has a variable called PWD
that contains the current directory: $PWD
is equivalent to `pwd`
. (So do other shells, this is a standard feature.) So you can write your script like this:
#!/bin/bash
until [ "$PWD" = "/" ]; do
echo "$PWD"
ls && cd .. && ls
done
Note the use of double quotes around the variable references. They are necessary if the variable (here, the current directory) contains whitespace or wildcards (\[?*
), because the shell splits the result of variable expansions into words and performs globbing on these words. Always double-quote variable expansions "$foo"
and command substitutions "$(foo)"
(unless you specifically know you have not to).
In the general case, as other answers have mentioned already:
- You can't use whitespace around the equal sign in an assignment:
var=value
, not var = value
- The
$
means “take the value of this variable”, so you don't use it when assigning: var=value
, not $var=value
.
You can also do way more complex commands, just to round out the examples above. So, say I want to get the number of processes running on the system and store it in the ${NUM_PROCS} variable.
All you have to so is generate the command pipeline and stuff it's output (the process count) into the variable.
It looks something like this:
NUM_PROCS=$(ps -e | sed 1d | wc -l)
I hope that helps add some handy information to this discussion.
Here's your script...
DIR=$(pwd)
echo $DIR
while [ "$DIR" != "/" ]; do
cd ..
DIR=$(pwd)
echo $DIR
done
Note the spaces, use of quotes, and $ signs.