How to assign return value of a command to two variables in Bash shell-CodePudding

I have a command called "mycommand" which returns a one line data that has 5 columns, like this:

val1   val2   val3  val4  val5

I would like to write a script to assign val1 to a variable and val2 to a different variable.

I have a shell script that does something like this:

INFO=$(mycommand | awk 'NR==1 {print $1,$2}')
echo "INFO 1 is ${INFO[1]}" 
echo "INFO 2 is ${INFO[2]}"

Obviously the above one does not work.

Can someone let me know how I can achieve this?

CodePudding user response：

You can create an array using the output of mycommand, by enclosing the command substitution $(command) with parentheses ( $(command) ).

Array indexing also starts at 0, so you'd want to use indexes 0/1.

#!/bin/bash

mycommand()
{
    echo val1 val2 val3 val4 val5
}

INFO=( $(mycommand | awk 'NR==1 {print $1,$2}') )
echo "INFO O is ${INFO[0]}"
echo "INFO 1 is ${INFO[1]}"

# Note: you could also just capture the whole output in the array
printf "\nAll columns:\n"

INFO=( $(mycommand) )
for ((i = 0; i < ${#INFO[@]}; i  )); do
    echo "INFO $i is ${INFO[$i]}"
done

Output

INFO O is val1
INFO 1 is val2

All columns:
INFO 0 is val1
INFO 1 is val2
INFO 2 is val3
INFO 3 is val4
INFO 4 is val5