Help dealing with spaces in text files.

TIA! Any help would be appreciated...

I am trying to fill an array with a list of names that may or may not contain spaces (e.g. system_one, system two, sys -3, etc.). I am able to parse the text file and extract the names I want with the following:

cat file.txt | awk -F'\t' '{print $1}'

Which produces a list of names that contain the information I want, but I am unable to feed these into a array and maintain the whitespaces within the names. This is how I have tried to feed the array.

for X in `cat file.txt |awk -F'\t' '{print $1}'
do
ARRAY[$COUNTER]="$X"
COUNTER=$COUNTER+1
done

However, I end up with a list of names that are split on every space encountered in the names. Short of using 'tr' to replace all the spaces in the names, I can not figure out how to store them in the array properly.

Thanks,
RU

try this
cat file.txt |awk -F'\t' '{print $1}' > file1.txt
while read X
do
ARRAY[$COUNTER]="$X"
COUNTER=$COUNTER+1
done < file1.txt

Regards
Guru

gurdeepdua:
you really are the best
the best horse in stable.

Thanks very much for the assist. Seems I need to brush up on redirects.

-RU

i really don't understand, why people insist writing such
betises.
1)
cat fname|awk ....
just for fun try
awk .... fname
2)
if you use it, why don't you let awk do the job ?
awk still splitted the data in arrays and field
3)
you say: spaces (e.g. system_one, system two, sys -3, etc.).
and you set the InputFieldSep to '\t' ???
(at the moment, i have no acces to my *nix sys, it's down
so i can||will not test your code)
IMO 'spaces' are 'spaces' not only 'tabs'
what happens if awk does not find a 'tab' ?
4)
no idea about the shell you are using and
you do NOT initialize COUNTER, poor prog style!
a lot of progs crash because of that.
5)
for what that redirect ???
6)
finally: what are you doing? the Q is really not clear!