benchmarking some ways to extract the first word of a string in bash

bench-extract-first-column.sh

#!/bin/bash

iuser="boby me me and me"

pipe_it() {
  echo "$iuser" | awk '{print $1}'
}

heredoc_it() {
  awk '{print $1}' <<< "$iuser"
}

substitute_it() {
  echo "${iuser%% *}"
}

bench_with() {
  echo
  echo "$1":
  time for n in {1..1000}; do "$1" > /dev/null; done
}

bench_with 'pipe_it'
bench_with 'heredoc_it'
bench_with 'substitute_it'