Set variable in current shell from awk

Question

Is there a way to set a variable in my current shell from within awk?

I\'d like to do some processing on a file and print out some data; since I\'ll rea

Answer 1

Here's another way.

This is especially useful when when you've got the values of your variables in a single variable and you want split them up. For example, you have a list of values from a single row in a database that you want to create variables out of.

val="hello|beautiful|world" # assume this string comes from a database query
read a b c <<< $( echo ${val} | awk -F"|" '{print $1" "$2" "$3}' )

echo $a #hello
echo $b #beautiful
echo $c #world

We need the 'here string' i.e <<< in this case, because the read command does not read from a pipe and instead reads from stdin