Quick Shell script question

[Henry Axelrod]

I have been trying to do something that seems that it should be very
simple in a shell script. I am trying to make a variable equal to the
output of a command. The command started off very complex but I created
a test script to bring it down to it's most simple form and it still
does not work. Here is the test script:

#!/bin/bash
# test script

test1='pwd'
echo $test1

when in this format the test1 variable echo's the word pwd instead of
the current directory.
I have also tried
test1= 'pwd'      # test1 is null and command executes
I am almost positive I have done this before in a script. 
Any help would be appreciate.

Linux AS 2.1 Kernel 2.4.9-e.35
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