Adding Content to Variable (bash)

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

is this possible?

its kind of like incrementing the value of a number in a variable. but in this case, instead of the value of the variable being a number, it's just contents/strings/characters/alpha-numeric etc. NOT a number.

For instance:

VAR=Tommy

for all in $(blah blah)

do
    VAR=($echo $all)
    ###the variable $all can be any name .i.e cindy, sally, roy, matt
done

so at the end of the loop, i want the variable VAR to contain everything that was appended to it.

So, if i were to do something like this after the for loop completes:

echo "$VAR"

i should see everything that was added to the VAR variable:

Tommy
Cindy
Sally
Roy
Matt

OS: Linux Red Hat / Ubuntu and Sun Solaris
Shell: Bash

2

Not sure if this is what you want:

 
VAR=Tommy

for all in $(blah blah)

do
    VAR="$VAR $all"    
done

echo "$VAR"
3

Recent bash versions support the += operator:

bash-4.2$ for l in {a..d}; do v+=$l; done; printf '%s\n' "$v"
abcd