I have a bash script that calls a python script. At first I was just returning one variable and that is fine, but now I was told to return two variables and I was wondering if there is a clean and simple way to return more than one variable.

archiveID=$(python glacier_upload.py $archive_file_name $CURRENTVAULT)

Is the call I make from bash

print archive_id['ArchiveId']
archive_id['ArchiveId']

This returns the archive id to the bash script

Normally I know you can use a return statement in python to return multiple variables, but with it just being a script that is the way I found to return a variable. I could make it a function that gets called but even then, how would I receive the multiple variables that I would be passing back?

From your python script, output one variable per line. Then from you bash script, read one variable per line:

Python

print "foo bar"
print 5

Bash

#! /bin/bash

python main.py | while read line ; do
    echo $line
done

Final Solution:

Thanks Guillaume! You gave me a great starting point out the soultion. I am just going to post my solution here for others.

#! /bin/bash

array=()
while read line ; do
  array+=($line)
done < <(python main.py)
echo ${array[@]}

I found the rest of the solution that I needed here