mxstein

I'm having the same problem and was wondering if you found a fix.

I want to store the output of an awk command into a variable to be used later.

Have file names
first last cuid

awk '{print $2 ; }' names
will list last names

last='awk '{print $2 ; }' names'
will not work

any suggestions? I think I have to do something with the quotes to get the output of the awk to go into the variable last.