How to read a file into a variable in shell?

Question

I want to read a file and save it in variable, but I need to keep the variable and not just print out the file. How can I do this? I have written this script but it isn't quite what I needed: #!/bin/sh while read LINE do echo $LINE done <$1 echo 11111----------- echo $LINE In my script, I can give the file name as a parameter, so, if the file contains "aaaa", for example, it would print out this: aaaa 11111----- But this just prints out the file onto the screen, and I want to save it into a variable! Is there an easy way to do this?

Answer 1

If you are using sh as your shell, the best way to load an entire file into one variable is this simple assignment:

$ whole_file=`cat myfile.txt`

In bash shell, you also can use the following substitution construct:

$ whole_file=$(< myfile.txt)