no need to use external commands. Bash itself can do the job. Assuming "word1 word2" you got from somewhere and stored in a variable, eg

$ string="word1 word2"

$ set -- $string

$ echo $1

word1

$ echo $2

word2

now you can assign $1, or $2 etc to another variable if you like.

I think one efficient way is the use of bash arrays:

array=( $string ) # do not use quotes in order to allow word expansion

echo ${array[0]}  # You can retrieve any word. Index runs from 0 to length-1

Also, you can directly read arrays in a pipe-line:

echo "word1 word2" | while read -a array; do echo "${array[0]}" ; done

echo "word1 word2 word3" | { read first rest ; echo $first ; }

This has the advantage that is not using external commands and leaves the $1, $2, etc. variables intact.

You could try awk

echo "word1 word2" | awk '{ print $1 }'

With awk it is really easy to pick any word you like ($1, $2, ...)

If you are sure there are no leading spaces, you can use bash parameter substitution:

$ string="word1  word2"

$ echo ${string/% */}

word1

Watch out for escaping the single space. See here for more examples of substitution patterns. If you have bash > 3.0, you could also use regular expression matching to cope with leading spaces - see here:

$ string="  word1   word2"

$ [[ ${string} =~  *([^ ]*) ]]

$ echo ${BASH_REMATCH[1]}

word1

echo "word1 word2" | cut -f 1 -d " "

cut cuts the 1st field (-f 1) from a list of fields delimited by the string " " (-d " ")

Using shell paramter expansion

Here is another solution using shell parameter expansion. It takes care of multiple spaces after the first word. Handling spaces in front of the first word requires one additional expansion.

string='word1    word2  '

echo ${string%% *}

word1

Explanation

The %% signifies deleting the longest match of * (a space followed by whatever number of any other characters), starting from the right-hand side of the variable string.

read is your friend:

• 
  

  If string is in a variable:

  
  
  

  string="word1 word2"
  
  read -r first _ <<< "$string"
  
  printf '%sn' "$first"
  
  

  
  


• 
  

  If you're working in a pipe: first case: you only want the first word of the first line:

  
  
  

  printf '%sn' "word1 word2" "line2" | { read -r first _; printf '%sn' "$first"; }
  
  

  
  
  

  second case: you want the first word of each line:

  
  
  

  printf '%sn' "word1 word2" "worda wordb" | while read -r first _; do printf '%sn' "$first"; done
  
  

  
  

These work if there are leading spaces:

printf '%sn' "   word1 word2" | { read -r first _; printf '%sn' "$first"; }

I wondered how several of the top answers measured up in terms of speed. I tested the following:

1 @mattbh's

echo "..." | awk '{print $1;}'

2 @ghostdog74's

string="..."; set -- $string; echo $1

3 @boontawee-home's

echo "..." | { read -a array ; echo ${array[0]} ; }

and 4 @boontawee-home's

echo "..." | { read first _ ; echo $first ; }

I measured them with Python's timeit in a Bash script in a Zsh terminal on macOS, using a test string with 215 5-letter words. Did each measurement five times (the results were all for 100 loops, best of 3), and averaged the results:

method       time

--------------------------------

1. awk       9.2ms

2. set       11.6ms (1.26 * "1")

3. read -a   11.7ms (1.27 * "1")

4. read      13.6ms (1.48 * "1")

Nice job, voters 👏 The votes (as of this writing) match the solutions' speed!

As perl incorporates awk's functionality this can be solved with perl too:

echo " word1 word2" | perl -lane 'print $F[0]'

I was working with a embedded device which had neither perl, awk or python and did it with sed instead. It supports multiple spaces before the first word (which the cut and bash solutions did not handle).

VARIABLE="  first_word_with_spaces_before_and_after  another_word  "

echo $VARIABLE | sed 's/ *([^ ]*).*/1/'

This was very useful when grepping ps for process IDs since the other solutions here using only bash was not able to remove the first spaces which ps uses to align.