Shell Programming and Scripting

I am getting a parameter from a user and I need to use it to search and return the matching line numbers in a file. I am using this code:

Code:

recordNumber="$(sed -n '/'"$entry"'/{
=
d
}' unixdb1.txt)"

where $entry is the passed search parameter. The problem is I need to ignore the case. I've seen some searches where they say you can use the i or I option but it doesn't work for me. Is there anyway to do this or can it be done a different way? Thanks.

Code:

awk '/[Ee][Nn][Tt][Rr][Yy]/ {print NR}' infile

Hi, snag49ers:

If you are using GNU SED and portability isn't a concern, I believe you can follow an address with an I flag. For example, to print only lines that case-insensitively match "searchterm":

Code:

sed -n '/searchterm/I p'

That said, I think this is a poor solution to this problem. If the user-provided parameter contains characters which have a special meaning to sed at that location in the command, your code will make a mess of things. I would suggest the following:

Code:

grep -Fin "$entry" unixdb1.txt | cut -d: -f1

Whatever the value of $entry may be, it will be matched properly and there's no chance of regexp metacharacters messing things up.

Cheers,
Alister

Thanks Alister. I went ahead and used the grep and cut. I knew how to do that one but I just wondered if you could use sed. Portability is definitely an issue and I don't have GNU sed so I can't use the I option. Thanks.


Bill