Question

I am using openssl to encrypt data in a file.

In the process of assigning the data in that file to shell variables, I am dynamically decrypting the file and attempting to use awk to parse it into variables.

$ myuser=$(echo | awk '{print $1}' | openssl aes-256-cbc -in encrypted -pass file:../password.txt -d) 
$ echo $myuser 
Bruce-Wayne Batman 0.0.0.0

I should just be echoing Bruce-Wayne but somehow my awk instruction is not working as well as I expect.

Can anyone offer an insight?

Answer 1

You seem to have your piping muddled:

$ myuser=$(openssl aes-256-cbc -in encrypted -pass file:../password.txt -d | awk '{print $1}')

That is you want the first field in Bruce-Wayne Batman 0.0.0.0 which is effectively:

echo "Bruce-Wayne Batman 0.0.0.0" | awk '{print $1}'

Doing echo | awk '{print $1}' is the same as doing echo you are piping the output of echo (which is nothing) into awk.