This is a very useful feature to understand, as it will allow us to create some good tools.
Many times in programming, we want to capture the output of a command, and use it later. As an example, we want to capture today's date, and enter it into a database.
It's easy enough to get the date while working on the command line:
date Tue Mar 17 13:11:13 EDT 2026
To get that result into a variable, is what this is all about.
Today=date echo $Today date echo '$Today' $Today echo "$Today" date
That didn't work. In order to get the result of a command into a variable, use back-ticks around the command:
Today=`date` echo $Today Tue Mar 17 13:24:28 EDT 2026 echo '$Today' $Today echo "$Today" Tue Mar 17 13:24:28 EDT 2026
As mentioned previously, it is NOT best practice to use back-ticks, because they can easily be interpreted as single quotes.
Instead, another format is better:
Today=$(date) echo "$Today" Tue Mar 17 13:50:09 EDT 2026 echo $Today Tue Mar 17 13:50:09 EDT 2026 echo '$Today' $Today