assign awk output to bash variable

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

greetings all,

I am have a heck of a time trying to accomplish a very simple thing. I have an array of "shortname<spaces>id" created from a dscl output. I want to assign shortname=word1 and id=word2. I have tried
shortname=$(${textArray[$i]} | awk '{print $1}') - and get 'awk : cannot open file - and the prints word 1.

e.g. awk : cannot open file johnsmith

Using the syntax >>echo ${textArray[$i]} | awk '{print $1}' << I can see it is finding the data correctly as it displays the shortname from the array.

Any suggestions for what I know is something really obvious that I have missed would be greatly appreciated.

thanks

2

shortname=`echo ${textArray[$i]} | awk '{print $1}'`

3

Or shorter:

shortname="${textArray% *}"
4

All set - works perfect.

thanks!