I have a text file like this:
first state
second state
third state
Getting the first word from every line isn't difficult, but the problem comes when adding the extra \n required to separate every word (selection) in dmenu, per its syntax:
echo -e "first\nsecond\nthird" | dmenu
I haven't been able to figure out how to add the separating \n. I've tried this:
state=$(awk '{for(i=1;i<=NF;i+=2)print $(i)'\n'}' text.txt)
But it doesn't work. I also tried this:
lol=$(grep -o "^\S*" states.txt | perl -ne 'print "$_"')
But same deal. Not sure what I'm doing wrong.
Your problem is in the AWK script. You need to identify each input line as a record. This way, you can control how each record in the output is separated via the ORS variable (output record separator). By default this separator is the newline, which should be good enough for your purpose.
Now to print the first word of every input record (each line in the input stream in this case), you just need to print the first field:
awk '{print $1}' textfile | dmenu
If you need the output to include the explicit \n string (not the control character), then you can just overwrite the ORS variable to fit your needs:
awk 'BEGIN{ORS="\\n"}{print $1}' textfile | dmenu