String concatenation in Bash script

Question

I am writing this Bash script:

count=0   
result

for d in `ls -1 $IMAGE_DIR | egrep \"jpg$\"`
do

    if (( (count % 4) == 0 )); then
                result=\"a         


        

Answer 1

The = operator must always be written without spaces around it:

result="$result $d"

(Pretty much the most important difference in shell programming to normal programming is that whitespace matters in places where you wouldn't expect it. This is one of them.)