I am trying to store values of the first line of a text file into an array. Here is what I have so far:
arr_values=()
awk '
NR==1 {
for (i=0; i<=NF; i++)
'arr_values[i]'=$i
}' file.txt
for ((i=0; i<${#arr_values[@]}; i++))
do
echo arr_values[i]
done
I am getting an error with initializing the array mainly because I don't know how to use awk to initialize an external array. Any suggestions (only with awk)? Thanks.
You can do this:
read -a array <<< $(head -n 1 file)
echo ${array[0]}
echo ${array[1]}
command | while read x; do array[0]=x; done it never works as part of a pipe and the same thing is happening here.<<< $(head -n 1 file) by <<< $(awk 'NR==1 {print;exit}' file). Also dogbane's answer could be modified to use awk : arr=($(awk 'NR==1{print;exit}' file)). However, the head statement is perfect here.You probably can simply just do
read -ra arr_values < file.txt
Which would only process the first line and split it uniformly like awk does; saving it into arr_values. No need to fork with external binary commands.
\t? The OP hasn't specified that and by default awk splits on whitespace.