Reading user input with read back

Question

when I use simple bash command

#!/bin/bash
echo Please, enter your name
read NAME
echo "Hi $NAME!"

and run it using source filename.sh it gives me an error :Undefined variable

what could be the problem? I search but there is no solution.

Solution

Summary for future reference:

The shebang points to /bin/bash but the source command makes the code run in a current shell which turned out to be csh.

The code works on my bash on Debian and it doesn't work on my csh there, when invoked with source filename.sh. Yet it looks like the OP's intention was to run it with bash.

To make it run with bash as intended, it needs to be made executable (chmod a+x filename.sh) and invoked by ./filename.sh.

And finally the #!/bin/bash shebang had a wrong path in this particular case.

Comments

[Kamil Maciorowski]

Does it run as expected when you invoke ./filename.sh without source?

[Loura]

It gives me "Permission denied"

[Kamil Maciorowski]

Make the file executable by chmod a+x ./filename.sh, then run ./filename.sh and post the result.

[Loura]

I did it, but it still not working : ./filename.sh: command not found

[Kamil Maciorowski]

What shell do you use? (try echo $SHELL). What is the output of /bin/bash -c ./filename.sh?

[Loura]

I am working on Freebsd shell. and this is my first time using it. the output is bin/csh

[Rahul]

Do you have bash installed? If not use FreeBSD Ports to install it. Use where bash to find out.

[Loura]

Thank you so much. when I try where bash , it gives me usr/local/bin/bash . I change the !/bin/bash to !/user/local/bin/bash and it works fine. I can't thank all enough.

[Kamil Maciorowski]

For the record: it works fine with source filename.sh or ./filename.sh only?

[Rahul]

@Loura : please accept the answer, if you do not know how to accept it read this.

[Stéphane Chazelas]

Note that the code would work in csh but do something different. Since csh has no read builtin, It would invoke a read command on the filesystem (which could not possibly set csh's $NAME variable), The echo "Hi $NAME!" would work if $NAME was set as an environment variable on in ~/.cshrc or anywhere else in the csh script prior to the source.