Question

I want to put the output of command in bash variable and then further use that variable in other command

Suppose i want something like this

ls | $(variable) |awk '/$variable/{print "here"}'

Answer 1

You can try:

variable=$(ls); awk "/$variable/"'{print "here"}'

Note 1: /$variable/ is surrounded by double quotes, otherwise it won’t be replaced by output of command.

Note 2: The above command may fail since the output of ls may contains “/” or newline, which will break the awk command. You may change ls to something like ls | tr '\n' ' ' | tr -d '/' | sed 's/ *$//g'(replace all newlines with spaces; delete all slashes; remove the trailing whitespace), depending on your goal.

Note 3: to avoid variable assignment polluting the current shell’s environment, you can wrap the above command by parentheses, i.e. (variable=$(some_command); awk "/$variable/"'{print "here"}')