Shell Programming and Scripting

You know what though? On second look, I can't think of any point saving those numbers when you already have them in a file. It's just as easy to use them right from the file, and you'll have no worries about running out of space in your variable.

Code:

while read A NUM G
do
       echo "NUM is $NUM"
done < inputfile

The A is so NUM reads the second column, and the G catches all the columns that come after it (if any) so they don't also get dumped in NUM.