The classical approach is:

RESULT="$(echo "$LINE"| awk '{print $1}')" # executes in a subshell 

Processing thousands of lines this way however fork()’s thousands of processes, which affects performance and makes your script CPU hungry.

Here is a more efficient way to do it:

LINE="col0 col1  col2     col3  col4      "
COLS=()

for val in $LINE ; do
        COLS+=("$val")
done

echo "${COLS[0]}"; # prints "col0"
echo "${COLS[1]}"; # prints "col1"
echo "${COLS[2]}"; # prints "col2"
echo "${COLS[3]}"; # prints "col3"
echo "${COLS[4]}"; # prints "col4"

If you want to split not by white-space but by any other character, you can temporarily change the IFS variable which determines how Bash recognizes fields and word boundaries.

P.S. For the record, here is the old solution:

#
# OLD CODE
# Update: Aug/2016: I've encountered a bug in Bash where this splitting doesn't work as expected! Please see the comments below.
#

# Here is the effective solution which I found with my colleagues at work:

COLS=( $LINE ); # parses columns without executing a subshell
RESULT="${COLS[0]}"; # returns first column (0-based indexes)

# Here is an example:

LINE="col0 col1  col2     col3  col4      " # white-space including tab chars
COLS=( $LINE ); # parses columns without executing a subshell

echo "${COLS[0]}"; # prints "col0"
echo "${COLS[1]}"; # prints "col1"
echo "${COLS[2]}"; # prints "col2"
echo "${COLS[3]}"; # prints "col3"
echo "${COLS[4]}"; # prints "col4"