title: Concatenating strings in bash
body: <p>A program has the output set to 2 decimal place floats, one on each line in the file.  Depending on the execution, many files can be output, each with the filename cancer.ex#, where # is the number of times the program was executed from a script.</p>
  
  <p>The professor has provided an awk script as the first step to generating a 95% confidence chart using gnuplot.  I'd like to convert the output to to the format</p>
  
  <p><code>conf  $1  $2  $3  var#</code></p>
  
  <p>where # is the number from cancer.ex#</p>
  
  <p>I've developed the following:</p>
  
  <pre><code>#!/bin/bash
  Files=Output/*
  String
  
  for f in $Files 
  do
      String="conf "
      cat $f | while read LINE
      do
          String="$LINE "
      done
  echo $String
  done
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I know a number of steps are missing, as I've just started putting this together.  My problem is executing the concatenation part, as it simply doesn't work.  There is no output, nada when executing the script above.  However, if I change <code>String="$LINE</code> to <code>echo $LINE</code>, then I get all the output of the files put on the terminal.</p>
  
  <p>Is there a workable appending function for variables inside a loop in bash?</p>