title: Make awk interpret one line at a time from variable
body: <p>I'm a completely new to shell scripting and bash. My question is how do I get awk to interpret a variable which contains linebreaks the same way as awk interpret the data from stdin?</p>
  
  <p>Example:</p>
  
  <pre><code>fileData=`cat /path/to/file`
  echo $fileData | awk '{print $1}'
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>The code above results in the following error message: <code>awk: program limit exceeded: maximum number of fields size=32767</code> which obviously means that awk interprets all the lines in <code>$fileData</code> at the same time and not one line at a time.</p>
  
  <p>How to make awk interpret one line at a time from a variable?</p>