Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi,
I need to search for a exact word in a file and I have a list of allowable values in a list file. I search something like this using egrep -f option:

Code:

>egrep -f list.txt data.txt
New
New York
NewYork
>

list.txt file has the allowable value for search and this file can be edited to add more in future:

Code:

>cat list.txt
New
Old

The data comes in a file called data.txt as shown below:

Code:

>cat data.txt
New
New York
NewYork
DC
LA
Chicago
Dallas
>

The issue is I only need to search for EXACT word and in the above case, I only need to see the output as 'New' but I also see other occurances or sub-strings. I tried all options but didnt work so far. Any inputs is appreciated.
Thanks,
Carl

Try this:

Code:

grep '^New$' inputfile

"grep -w" is the 1st thing to come to my mind...

But what do you mean by "exact"? What would not be "exact" in your case? "Naw" instead of "New", or "NewYork" because it's longer,...? In that case, does "New York" (with space) count or not?

Do you need to extract all the lines that match at least one string in file.txt? If yes I'd go for a small (Perl) script, although maybe (very MAYBE) you could manage with xargs.

I can use grep option at the command prompt but i need to use the list of allowable value from a file (ie list.txt) only as the values are contained in that file only.

Hi

cat list.txt

Code:

^New$
^Old$

cat data.txt

Code:

New
New York
NewYork
DC
LA
Chicago
Dallas

Using the command now

Code:

$ grep -f list.txt data.txt
New
$

or if you can't modify the list.txt content

Code:

awk '{print "^"$0"$"}' original.list.txt | grep -f /dev/stdin data.txt

Thank you all for your suggestion, I can use one of your above solutions.