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up vote 3 down vote favorite

I don't know how to use variables for further executing in a script.

I tried the following: 

#!/bin/bash
NUM = 0
echo Number $NUM > text.txt

but I get the following error:

num.sh: 3: num.sh: NUM: not found

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up vote 12 down vote accepted

There must not be any whitespace around = in variable declaration in shell.

Remove the whitespaces:

NUM=0

Also if you don't have any good reason, don't use all uppercases for a user defined shell variable name as there is chance that this could conflict with any environment variable.

Better do:

number=0
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6  
+1 for lower case variables. I've heard seasoned programmers - people much smarter than I am - saying that bash variables should always be upper case... – pfnuesel 2 days ago
up vote 3 down vote

Don't use spaces in line NUM=0

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up vote 2 down vote

You may need to remove the space after NUM , so the script should look like:

#!/bin/bash
NUM=0
echo $NUM > text.txt
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