Trying to create variable, value not being held

I tried creating a variable with the awk command. The correct value is being printed to the screen; however, the variable max is not being set. The command "echo $max" is null. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

cat test.txt:
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 2005-01-12 20:51 file2005-01-12

awk -F"[ :]" '{max=$7*3600+$8*60; print max}' test.txt
75060

Okay - that is from your print statement

And it shouldn't be in the example since you didn't set it. Awk doesn't set it for external use - to set it externally from awk, try

Example (csh)
set max=`awk -F"[ :]" '{max=$7*3600+$8*60; print max}' test.txt`

RTM,

Thank you for the quick response. The variable is now being set.