You can pipe it through awk and make it echo the first word

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echo * | head -n1 | awk '{print $1;}'

or you cut the string up and select the first word:

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echo *  | head -n1 | cut -d " " -f1

or you pipe it thorugh sed and have it remove everything but the first word

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echo * | head -n1 | sed -e 's/\s.*$//'