Assign AWK result to variable [duplicate]

Question

This should be pretty straightfoward and I don't know why I am struggling with it.

I am running the following psql command from within a shell script in order to find out whether all indexes have been dropped before inserting data.

INDEXCOUNT=$(psql -p $dbPort -U enterprisedb -d main_db -c "select Count(*) from all_indexes where index_schema = 'enterprisedb';") 

At this point, INDEXCOUNT is equal to “COUNT ------- 0”

Now if I echo the following line I get the result I want -

echo $INDEXCOUNT | awk '{print $3}' 

How do I assign the value of $INDEXCOUNT | awk ‘{print $3}’ to a variable to check it in an “IF” statement?

For example:

RETURNCOUNT=$INDEXCOUNT | awk '{print $3}' 

Answer 1

The following works correctly on bash:

 a=$(echo '111 222 33' | awk '{print $3;}' )  echo $a # result is "33" 

Another option would be to convert the string to an array:

 a="111 222 333"  b=($a)   echo ${b[2]}  # returns 333 

Answer 2

You can try this:

RETURNCOUNT=`echo $INDEXCOUNT | awk '{print $3}'` 

The idea is to include any shell command between backticks to get the result into a variable.