Shell script to make many directories - bash

Question

I'm trying to create a file hierarchy to store data. I want to create a folder for each data acquisition session. That folder has five subfolders, which are named below. My code attempt below gives an error, but I'm not sure how to correct it.
Code
#!/bin/sh
TRACES = "/Traces"
LFPS = '/LFPS'
ANALYSIS = '/Analysis'
NOTES = '/Notes'
SPIKES = '/Spikes'
folders=($TRACES $LFPS $ANALYSIS $NOTES $SPIKES)
for folder in "${folders[#]}"
do
mkdir $folder
done
Error
I get an error when declaring the variables. As written above, bash flips the error Command not found. If, instead, I declare the file names as TRACES = $('\Traces'), bash flips the error No such file or directory.

Answer 1

Remove the spaces between the variable names and the values:
#!/bin/sh
TRACES="/Traces"
LFPS='/LFPS'
ANALYSIS='/Analysis'
NOTES='/Notes'
SPIKES='/Spikes'
folders=($TRACES $LFPS $ANALYSIS $NOTES $SPIKES)
for folder in "${folders[#]}"
do
mkdir $folder
done
With spaces, bash interprets this like
COMMAND param1 param2
with = as param1

Answer 2

I'm taking the 'no spaces around the variable assignments' part of the fix as given.
Using array notation seems like overkill. Allowing for possible spaces in names, you can use:
for dir in "$TRACE" "$LFPS" "$NOTES" "$PASS"
do mkdir "$dir"
done
But even that is wasteful:
mkdir "$TRACE" "$LFPS" "$NOTES" "$PASS"
If you're worried that the directories might exist, you can avoid error messages for that with:
mkdir -p "$TRACE" "$LFPS" "$NOTES" "$PASS"
The -p option is also valuable if the paths are longer and some of the intermediate directories might be missing. If you're sure there won't be spaces in the names, the double quotes become optional (but they're safe and cheap, so you might as well use them).

Answer 3

Also you would want to do some checking beforehand if folders exist or not.
Also you can always debug the shell script with set -x, you could just use "mkdir -p" which would do the trick.

Answer 4

I made the following changes to get your script to run.
As a review comment it is unusual to create such folders hanging off the root file system.
#!/bin/sh
TRACES="/Traces"
LFPS='/LFPS'
ANALYSIS='/Analysis'
NOTES='/Notes'
SPIKES='/Spikes'
folders="$TRACES $LFPS $ANALYSIS $NOTES $SPIKES"
for folder in $folders
do
mkdir $folder
done
Spaces were removed from the initial variable assignments and I also simplified the for loop so that it iterated over the words in the folders string.