How to store an output of shell script to a variable in Unix?

Two simple examples to capture output the pwd command:

$ b=$(pwd)
$ echo $b
/home/user1

or

$ a=`pwd`
$ echo $a
/home/user1

The first way is preferred. Note that there can't be any spaces after the = for this to work.

Example using a short script:

#!/bin/bash

echo "hi there"

then:

$ ./so.sh
hi there
$ a=$(so.sh)
$ echo $a
hi there

In general a more flexible approach would be to return an exit value from the command and use it for further processing, though sometimes we just may want to capture the simple output from a command.