linux - Using output of awk to run command

Question

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!

the command is:

openssl s_client -connect host:port -cipher argument

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:

awk '{command = "openssl s_client -connect localhost:4433 -cipher > results.txt"
print $0 | command}' ciphers.txt

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?

Answer 1

Use system from within awk:

awk '{ system("openssl s_client -connect host:port -cipher " $1) }' ciphers.txt