I have a question to do and it's somewhat confusing. It says, and I quote

"Create a file called file_1 with three lines of text in it. Create a shell variable called "f_name", assign it the string "file_1". Use the cat command and the variable "f_name" to display the contents of the file "file_1""

Now what I did was I made both files, and in "f_name" I wrote this.

#!/bin/sh
f_name="file_1"
cat $f_name

and this will work. However what I think is the professor wants me to use this shell scripts f_name variable in a cat command without having the script itself do the work.

Is there a way to do this?

This is homework. We don't support homework on this forum.

And, no, your answer is not too far off. Just put those commands in a script.

True Jim! This is homework but the poor guy didnt hide the fact, not like other questions Ive seen... And he shown he is trying, so why not help without solving the problem?
As Jim mentionned you are in fact very close...
Where were you asked to write a script?
If you do exactly (One point after another, I counted 3) what is being asked and I know by what you already wrote, you cant go wrong!

All the best

#!/bin/sh
history | tail -3 >file_1
f_name="file_1"
cat $f_name


It appears that the first part of the instructions are to create a file with 3 lines of text. So, need something to generate 3 lines of text. (And there are many other ways to generate random text.)