Read variable from AWK

Question

I'm trying to get memory info by this command:

#!/bin/bash
set -x
cat /proc/meminfo | grep "MemFree" | tail -n 1 | awk '{ print $2 $4 }' | read numA numB
echo $numA

I'm getting this

+ awk '{ print $2 $4 }'
+ read numA numB
+ tail -n 1
+ grep MemFree
+ cat /proc/meminfo
+ echo

My attempts to read these data to variable were unsuccessful. My question is how I can read this to variables? I want to read how many memory is free like: 90841312 KB

Regards

Answer 1

Assign the output directly to your variable:

var=$(cat /proc/meminfo | grep "MemFree" | tail -n 1 | awk '{ print $2 $4 }')
echo $var

Answer 2

Using BASH you can reduce your complex commands to this:

read -r _ numA _ numB < <(grep MemFree /proc/meminfo | tail -n 1)