How do you execute SQL from within a bash script?

I'm slightly confused. You should be able to call sqlplus from within the bash script. This may be what you were doing with your first statement

Try Executing the following within your bash script:

#!/bin/bash          
echo Start Executing SQL commands
sqlplus <user>/<password> @file-with-sql-1.sql
sqlplus <user>/<password> @file-with-sql-2.sql

If you want to be able to pass data into your scripts you can do it via SQLPlus by passing arguments into the script:

Contents of file-with-sql-1.sql

 select * from users where username='&1';

Then change the bash script to call sqlplus passing in the value

#!/bin/bash

MY_USER=bob
sqlplus <user>/<password> @file-with-sql-1.sql $MY_USER

Maybe you can pipe SQL query to sqlplus. It works for mysql:

echo "SELECT * FROM table" | mysql --user=username database

You can also use a "here document" to do the same thing:

VARIABLE=SOMEVALUE

sqlplus connectioninfo << HERE
start file1.sql
start file2.sql $VARIABLE
quit
HERE

Here is a simple way of running MySQL queries in the bash shell

mysql -u [database_username] -p [database_password] -D [database_name] -e "SELECT * FROM [table_name]"