Question

I’m trying to create a file hierarchy to store data. I want to create a folder for each data acquisition session. That folder has five subfolders, which are named below. My code attempt below gives an error, but I’m not sure how to correct it.

Code

 #!/bin/sh
 TRACES = "/Traces"
 LFPS = '/LFPS'
 ANALYSIS = '/Analysis' 
 NOTES = '/Notes'
 SPIKES = '/Spikes'

 folders=($TRACES $LFPS $ANALYSIS $NOTES $SPIKES)
 for folder in "${folders[@]}"
  do
    mkdir $folder
  done

Error
I get an error when declaring the variables. As written above, bash flips the error Command not found. If, instead, I declare the file names as TRACES = $('\Traces'), bash flips the error No such file or directory.

Answer 1

Remove the spaces between the variable names and the values:

#!/bin/sh
TRACES="/Traces"
LFPS='/LFPS'
ANALYSIS='/Analysis' 
NOTES='/Notes'
SPIKES='/Spikes'

folders=($TRACES $LFPS $ANALYSIS $NOTES $SPIKES)
for folder in "${folders[@]}"
 do
   mkdir $folder
 done

With spaces, bash interprets this like

COMMAND param1 param2

with = as param1