title: Unix variable assignment inside shell
body: <p>New to unix, hopefully this is a very basic question, but I'm not sure what to look up.<br>
  I have a line command, below, which reads the first word of a text file.<br>
  <code>cut -d' ' -f1 timestep</code></p>
  
  <p>I need to run it inside a shell script and assign the string to a variable. Simply assigning this expression to a variable doesn't do anything. How do I need to change this expression?</p>
  
  <pre><code>timestep= cut -d' ' -f1 timestep
  </code></pre>