Listing time every second as a Bash script

Question

Hello all, first time here as I've finally started to learn programming. Anyway, I'm just trying to print the time in nanoseconds every second here, and I have this:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

while true;
do
 date=(date +%N) ;
 echo $date ;
 sleep  1 ;
done

Now, that simply yields a string of date's, which isn't what I want. What is wrong? My learning has been rather messy, so I hope you'll excuse me for this if it's really simple. Also, I did manage to fine this, that worked on the prompt:

while true ; do date +%N ; sleep 1 ; done

But that obviously doesn't work as a script?

Edit, if anyone sees this: Ahh, this does indeed fix my error. I note you didn't add a ; Is that because I only defined a variable? Also, could you explain what the $ does? I thought it was for calling variables. And I see that the above line will indeed work as a script; I had expected the output of date to not be put on the screen.

Answer 1

Change

date=(date +%N) ;

to

date=$(date +%N)