Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi All,


I need to search in a csv file as mentioend in the Appendix A for a exact word lets "TEST".


But using teh below command iam getting TEST1234, TEST12 and otehr entries as well.

the problem is i check this condition to check to add a record to a table by making sure it does not exits. But since it reurns TEST1234, i am not able to ad the record in Table.

is_there=$(awk -F ',' '{print$1}' test.dat | grep "TEST" )

Can you please a command preferable awk , which could search for the exact patterm.


Thanks a lot in anticpation.


Appendix A:

"TEST1234", " test desc"
"TEST12", " test desc"
"TABC123", " test desc"
"TBC", " test desc"
"12345", " test desc"

hello rahman,
how you doing?
you can use ERE aka extended regular expressions.
So I use "egrep" instead of "grep"
so your one-liner becomes like this
is_there=$(awk -F ',' '{print$1}' test.dat | egrep "\bTEST\b" ) #where \b is the non word chararter in Extended Regex Context.
Other thing that I would like to mention that using awk and grep together is not a good practice. the latter is supposed to disappear when the former makes a presence.
Regards

Code:

nawk ' /^"TEST", / ' test.dat

Thanks for the feedback.

I tried the mentioend commands it does not work .

In the meain while i tried

abc_var= echo "${abc_var}"| sed -e s/\"/\\\\\"/g

is_there=cat test.dat |awk 'BEGIN {FS=",";i=0} {if ( $1 == "${abc_var}" ) {i=i+1}} END'


But this prints the cat output on console . test.dat is huge so it does not look good.

Any suggestions will be welcome.

Thanks in anticipation.

You could also use

Code:

find /path/to/file -iname "*.dat" | xargs grep "TEST"

to find the exact pattern. Just an idea

Code:

more foo
"TEST1234", " test desc"
"TEST12", " test desc"
"TABC123", " test desc"
"TBC", " test desc"
"12345", " test desc"
root@foo:/tmp/js# cat foo |egrep -w "TEST12"
"TEST12", " test desc"

The use of awk and grep together is recommended by the authors of the language in their book, The AWK Programming Language:

"If you have to search a big file to isolate a small amount of data, use grep or egrep for the searching and awk for the processing."