I'm writing a script and I would like to pass the results from bc into a variable. I've declared 2 variables (var1 and var2) and have given them values. In my script I want to pass the results from bc into another variable say var3 so that I can work with var3 for other calculations. So far I have been able write the result to a file which is not what I'm looking for and also I've been able to echo the result in the terminal but I just want to pass the result to a variable at moment so that I can work with that variable. echo "scale=2;$var1/var2" | bc