I am trying to write a bash script. I am able to do simple things like pass arguments, assign variables and echo the results. However, when I try to declare and array or anything a little more complicated I get
': not a valid identifier

Here is my code so far:

#!/bin/bash
echo start t
declare -a ARRAY
echo end t

And when I execute the script I get:

start t
': not a valid identifier
end t

My plan is to make a script that reads a file on line at a time and output's only part of each line to another file. It doesn't seem like it should be hard. But I can't get anything to work.