Question

Is it possible to have an awk command within a bash script return values to a bash variable, i.e.,if my awk script does some arithmetic operations, can I store the answers in variables so, they can be accessed in the bash script. If possible, how to distinguish between multiple return variables. Thanks.

Answer 1

No. You can use exit to return an error code, but in general you can’t modify the shell environment from a subprocess.

You can also, of course, print the desired content in awk and put it into variables in bash by using read:

read a b c <<< $(echo "foo" | awk '{ print $1; print $1; print $1 }')

Now $a, $b and $c are all ‘foo’. Note that you have to use the <<<$() syntax to get read to work. If you use a pipeline of any sort a subprocess is created too and the environment read creates the variables in is lost when the pipeline is done executing.