Cfrgtkky

To read variables from a file we can use the source or . command.

Lets assume the file contains the following line

MYVARIABLE="Any string"

we can then import this variable using

#!/bin/bash



source <filename>

echo $MYVARIABLE

Considering that you want all the content of your text file to be kept in your variable, you can use:

#!/bin/bash



file="/path/to/filename" #the file where you keep your string name



name=$(cat "$file")        #the output of 'cat $file' is assigned to the $name variable



echo $name               #test

Or, in pure bash:

#!/bin/bash



file="/path/to/filename"     #the file where you keep your string name



read -d $'x04' name < "$file" #the content of $file is redirected to stdin from where it is read out into the $name variable



echo $name                   #test

From within your script you can do this:

read name < file_containing _the_answer

You can even do this multiple times e.g. in a loop

while read LINE; do echo "$LINE"; done < file_containing_multiple_lines

One alternative way to do this would be to just redirect standard input to your file, where you have all the user input in the order it's expected by the program. For example, with the program (called script.sh)

#!/bin/bash

echo "Enter your name:"

read name

echo "...and now your age:"

read age



# example of how to use the values now stored in variables $name and $age

echo "Hello $name. You're $age years old, right?"

and the input file (called input.in)

Tomas

26

you could run this from the terminal in one of the following two ways:

$ cat input.in | ./script.sh

$ ./script.sh < input.in

and it would be equivalent to just running the script and entering the data manually - it would print the line "Hello Tomas. You're 26 years old, right?".

As Radu Rădeanu has already suggested, you could use cat inside your script to read the contents of a file into a avariable - in that case, you need each file to contain only one line, with only the value you want for that specific variable. In the above example, you'd split the input file into one with the name (say, name.in) and one with the age (say, age.in), and change the read name and read age lines to name=$(cat name.in) and age=$(cat age.in) respectively.

Short answer:

name=`cat "$file"`

I found working solution here:
https://af-design.com/2009/07/07/loading-data-into-bash-variables/

if [ -f $SETTINGS_FILE ];then

    . $SETTINGS_FILE

fi

If you want to use multiple strings, you could go with:

path="/foo/bar";

for p in `cat "$path"`;

do echo "$p" ....... (here you would pipe it where you need it) 

OR

If you want the user to indicate the file

read -e "Specify path to variable(s): " path;

for p in 'cat "$path"';

do echo "$p" ............................

name=$(<"$file") 

From man bash:1785, this command substitution is equivalent to name=$(cat "$file") but faster.

#! /bin/bash

#  (GPL3+) Alberto Salvia Novella (es20490446e)





variableInFile () {

    variable=${1}

    file=${2}



    source ${file}

    eval value=${${variable}}

    echo ${value}

}





variableInFile ${@}