I have a file called "krylov_methods", which has text like this:

cg     - preconditioned

cgne   - normal equations

nash   - cg subject to constraint

stcg   - another method for constraints

gmres  - general minimum residual

...

I need to extract the first word (character string) of each line, one by one, in a shell script and use it as a command line argument within that script. To extract the first word, I used the following command:

head -1 krylov_methods | tail -1 | awk '{print $1}'

head -2 krylov_methods | tail -1 | awk '{print $1}'

head -3 krylov_methods | tail -1 | awk '{print $1}'

...

This seems to work well for extracting the first word of each line one by one
However, I need to be able to store the character string as a variable for future use within the script. For example, since the first word of the first line of the file "krylov_methods" is the word "cg", I want to be able store "cg" to a variable called "method". Within the script, I would like for it to get something like:

method=cg  

./execute $method  

Is this possible to store the result of the 'head' command used within a shell script?