Question

I want to get an input from the user using read

read line

and the proper input would be a string and then a number:

a 5
b 6
+ 87

How do you separate the “a” and 5 into two variables, with the 5 into a integer variable?

Answer 1

I suggest reading the documenentation of read to get you started:

help read

Here are the first two paragraphs:

Read a line from the standard input and split it into fields.

Reads a single line from the standard input, or from file descriptor FD
if the -u option is supplied. The line is split into fields as with word
splitting, and the first word is assigned to the first NAME, the second
word to the second NAME, and so on, with any leftover words assigned to
the last NAME. Only the characters found in $IFS are recognized as word
delimiters.

Note that bash doesn’t have a notion of “integer variables” comparable to other programming languages. Bash variables are untyped. Declaring a variable as integer using declare -i only influences assignments to this variable — everything that is not a valid integer is silently set to 0.