You're assuming that awk will get something from test.txt, which it doesn't. Also piping anything to cd will not work as cd is not a real program but a shell builtin command. The text from cat test.txt is piped to cd, which doesn't do anything with it. After that, you launch awk in it's own sub-shell using backticks. There is no connection between the awk in the sub-shell and the cat.

You want to read a line from test.txt, split it up, build a path and change the directory to said path. This can be done as follows:

cat test.txt | read first last; cd "/folder/p/$first/$last"

I assume the following layout for test.txt:

firstdirectory lastdirectory

This solution has problems when the first directory string contains whitespaces as read uses them as a separator. It is just an example to start with.

You're assuming that your second call to awk will get something from test.txt, which it doesn't. The text from cat test.txt is piped to the command after the pipe and the command in the sub-shell (the first awk) receives all the input, leaving no input for the second awk, as kojiro already answered.

While merging both awk commands will fix the problem, is is not guaranteed that this will work in other shells. Because many people confuse bash with 'shell' in general I think it's noteworthy that a more portable solution would be the one made by Beta.

You're assuming that awk will get something from test.txt, which it doesn't. Also piping anything to cd will not work as cd is not a real program but a shell builtin command.

You want to read a line from test.txt, split it up, build a path and change the directory to said path. This can be done as follows:

cat test.txt | read first last; cd "/folder/p/$first/$last"

I assume the following layout for test.txt:

firstdirectory lastdirectory

This solution has problems when the first directory string contains whitespaces as read uses them as a separator. It is just an example to start with.

You're assuming that awk will get something from test.txt, which it doesn't. Also piping anything to cd will not work as cd is not a real program but a shell builtin command. The text from cat test.txt is piped to cd, which doesn't do anything with it. After that, you launch awk in it's own sub-shell using backticks. There is no connection between the awk in the sub-shell and the cat.

You want to read a line from test.txt, split it up, build a path and change the directory to said path. This can be done as follows:

cat test.txt | read first last; cd "/folder/p/$first/$last"

I assume the following layout for test.txt:

firstdirectory lastdirectory

This solution has problems when the first directory string contains whitespaces as read uses them as a separator. It is just an example to start with.