Question

I can redirect the output and then cat the file and grep/awk the variable, but I would like to use this file for multiple variables.

So If it was one variable say STATUS then i could do some thing like

echo "STATUS $STATUS" >> variable.file
#later perhaps in a remote shell where varible.file was copied
NEW_VAR=`cat variable.file | awk print '{$2}'`

I guess some inline editing with sed would help. The smaller the code the better.

Answer 1

The declare builtin is useful here

for var in STATUS FOO BAR; do
    declare -p $var | cut -d ' ' -f 3- >> filename
done

As Brian says, later you can source filename

declare is great because it handles quoting for you:

$ FOO='"I'"'"'m here," she said.'
$ declare -p FOO
declare -- FOO="\"I'm here,\" she said."
$ declare -p FOO | cut -d " " -f 3-
FOO="\"I'm here,\" she said."