How to store an output of shell script to a variable in Unix?

Question

i have a shell script "script.sh" which gives output as "success" or "Failed" when i execute in unix window. Now i want to store the output of script.sh into a unix command variable. say $a = {output of script.sh}

Answer 1

Two simple examples to capture output the pwd command:

$ b=$(pwd) $ echo $b /home/user1 

or

$ a=`pwd` $ echo $a /home/user1 

The first way is preferred. Note that there can't be any spaces after the = for this to work.

Example using a short script:

#!/bin/bash  echo "hi there" 

then:

$ ./so.sh hi there $ a=$(so.sh) $ echo $a hi there 

In general a more flexible approach would be to return an exit value from the command and use it for further processing, though sometimes we just may want to capture the simple output from a command.