Question

grep -A 26 "some text" somefile.txt |
   awk '/other text/ { gsub(/M/, " "); print $4 }' |
   sort -n -r | uniq | head -1

will return the largest in a list pulled from a large text file, but how do I store the output as a variable?

Answer 1

Use command substitution:

my_var=$(grep -A 26 "some text" somefile.txt |
   awk '/other text/ { gsub(/M/, " "); print $4 }' |
   sort -n -r | uniq | head -n1)

Also, for portability, I would suggest always using -n1 for the argument of head. I’ve come across a couple of incarnations of it where using -1 doesn’t work.