BASH - assign file contents to variable

[nanode]

I'm pretty decent with basic bash scripting, but I cannot figure out howto assign the contents of a text file to a variable.

Suppose I have a file foo.log and I want to assign it to x

Is there a way to pipe so that:

x=(contents of foo.log)

Thanks

[Gnu/Vince]

x = `cat foo.bar`

??

[nanode]

yup - I needed to use the ` around the operation :(