hello guys,
hope u can help im trying to integrate awk in a variable and then display the values in the variable which i would then use as a menu.

my code goes like this ....

OPTIONS= awk '{print $1}' /etc/fstab

select opt in $OPTIONS; do
if [ "$opt" = "$opt" ]; then #the code is $opt = $opt because $OPTIONS contains alot of other values. while opt already has a selected value#
echo "executing..."
done

....
....

something like:
?

You're not far away with your OPTIONS= bit.

Are you sure you want $1 from fstab, and not $2 (the FS mount point)?

In any case fstab may contain comments and blank lines, so you should remove these.

to put the values into an array. You can access the values as
or to put them into a single variable

Update: Oh yes, and the "export OPTIONS" doesn't hurt.

An update to this problem :

im thinking of using

awk '$2 ~ /^\/home/ {sub(/$/,",usrquota",$4); print; next} {print}' infile

to search for specific column and replace it with other values. However, i want to use the $opt (assume that i use mountpoint in this variable) , thus it would look something like this

awk '$2 ~ /^/$opt/ {sub(/$/,",usrquota",$4); print; next} {print}' infile

and thus want this line to edit column based on what the user selects. However, im getting errors.

By "specific columns" I read you to mean "specific values in specific columns"?

The code
won't work because $opt (I presume) is a shell variable, not an awk one (which don't have a leading $ (except built-in ones)).