In bash, I can do something like this:

foo=`cat bar`

... and then the variable $foo will be the content of the file "bar."

I want to use the cat command to assign a value in my vimrc.  I'm sure this
is possible, but I can't figure it out.

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I'm not 100% sure what you're trying to accomplish, but if you want to
actually invoke cat to dump the contents of a file "bar" into a Vim
variable "foo", you can do:

    let foo = system('cat bar')

where the string passed to system() can be any arbitrary shell command.

Excerpts from ninjaaron's message of Thu Nov 10 23:24:13 +0100 2011:

let foo=system('cat bar')
or let foo = join(readfile('bar'),"\n") # lookup binary options

Why do you want to use cat? ..

Marc Weber

Thanks guys.  I've been writing some scripts to change themes for my window
manager and my terminals together on the fly, and I made some vim
highlighting schemes to go along with them.  With this command, I can echo
some text from my scripts to a file, and then have .vimrc read the file and
select the appropriate color scheme.

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