Mastering Bash

Variables

What is a variable? We could answer that it is something not constant; nice joke, but it would not help us so much. Better to think of it as a bucket where we can store some information for later processing: at a certain point of your script you get a value, a piece of info that you do not want to process at that very moment, so you fit it into a variable that you will recall later in the script. This is, in an intuitive way, the use of a variable, a way to allocate a part of the system memory to hold your data.

So far, we have seen that our scripts could retrieve some pieces of information from the system and had to process them straight away, since, without the use of a variable, we had no way to further process the information ...