title: Using output of awk to run command
body: <p>I am brand new to shell scripting and cannot seem to figure out this seemingly simple task. I have a text file (ciphers.txt) with about 250 lines, and I would like to use the first column of each line as an argument in a command. Any help would be greatly appreciated!</p>
  
  <p>the command is:</p>
  
  <pre><code>openssl s_client -connect host:port -cipher argument
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>It works fine when I do one at a time but I do not really want to run the same command 250+ times. Here is my script so far:</p>
  
  <pre><code>awk '{command = "openssl s_client -connect localhost:4433 -cipher &gt; results.txt"
  print $0 | command}' ciphers.txt
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I keep getting an error so I am pretty sure I have a syntax error somewhere. Is the output of awk being appended after -cipher?</p>