Hi there

I have a file with a variable amount of rows but the 45th, 46th and 47th charachter of each line is the status field which is a three digit code ie 001, 002, 003 etc. My question is this..I need to strip all the records/lines with 002's out of the file completely and put them into another file leaving the original file with everything but the 002's. Sorry for the Newbieness of this question but im a bit stuck on this one

any help on this would be greatly appreciated
Cheers
Gary

Which OS and shell are you using, and can we see a sample set of the data?

Something like
Should have the desired effect.

Cheers
ZB

EDIT:
A safer bet would be including "^" in the expression, i.e.
grep -v '^.\{44\}002.*' infile > outfile

example file

xxxxxxxxx,xxxxxxxxx,xxxxxxxxx,xxxxxxxxx,xxx,001,xxx
xxxxxxxxx,xxxxxxxxx,xxxxxxxxx,xxxxxxxxx,xxx,002,xxx
xxxxxxxxx,xxxxxxxxx,xxxxxxxxx,xxxxxxxxx,xxx,004,xxx
xxxxxxxxx,xxxxxxxxx,xxxxxxxxx,xxxxxxxxx,xxx,007,xxx
xxxxxxxxx,xxxxxxxxx,xxxxxxxxx,xxxxxxxxx,xxx,002,xxx
xxxxxxxxx,xxxxxxxxx,xxxxxxxxx,xxxxxxxxx,xxx,002,xxx

os = solaris9
shell = ksh

I tried the command

grep -v '.\{44\}002.*' infile > outfile

but this just removes the 002's completely and populates the outfile with whatever is left, how can I can i create a second outfile (say outfile2) using the same method but this time putting just the 002's in there, as i say, i need tio keep the extracted 002's in a seperate file


cheers

To have just the 002's don't use the -v option to grep.

i.e.

grep '.\{44\}002.*' infile > outfile2

So we've got

grep '.\{44\}002.*' infile > 002s_only
grep -v '.\{44\}002.*' infile > everything_else

I'd suggest you have a read through the grep manual page, also "man 7 regex" on Linux, "man 5 regexp" on HP-UX (not too sure about Solaris) will give info on Regular Expressions. (else there's always google!).

Study regular expressions. If you intend to work at the Unix command line, they will prove invaluable.

Cheers
ZB

thanks, that works great

Hi again, ok I thought this was resolved but they now want to extract the 002's and the 003's into a file and the rest into another file, so basically I need to add some sort of AND operator into this command


grep '.\{44\}002.*' infile > outfile

so i sort of want it to do

grep '.\{44\}002 AND 003.*' infile > outfile


obviously this means that when I use the -v to extract all non 002/003 lines i will need to use this AND operator aswell


is this possible ?