Pass Variable Value as Argument to Command

Question

I want to let xdotool type the current date automatically and wrote this bash script as a first try:

#!/bin/bash          
STR="Hello World!"
xdotool type $STR

Unfortunately, it already fails at this point. It just types ... something ... Something like "<[<[<" or "H[ll==]l{₁". Why is this? How do I make it type a string or the current date (format: YYYY-MM-DD, so today is 2016-01-06)?

Answer 1

#!/bin/bash          
xdotool type `date +%Y-%m-%d`

Answer 2

I used STR="Hello World!" && xdotool type $STR which seemed to work. Not sure why yours didn't work. if you want to debug bash scripts you can use the shell built-in set -xv to get verbose details.

#!/bin/bash          
set -xv
STR="Good Bye Cruel World!"  && xdotool type $STR