Hi All,
is there a way to extract the line number of an occurrence using grep?
I know that with the -n option it prints out the line number as well.
I would like to assign the line number to a variable.
Thanks,
Sarah

grep -n 'pattern ' inputfile | read number_var junk
echo $number_var

file="..."
pattern="..."
a=`cat -n $file | grep $pattern | awk '{print $1}'`

var=`grep -n pattern inputfile | cut -d : -f 1`

var=$(grep -n 'pattern' infile)
echo ${var%%:*}

var=$(awk '/pattern/{print NR}' infile)

var=$(sed -n '/pattern/=' infile)

thank you all, how do I access the first value of the variable in case of more than one occurrence?
I tried var[0]...but with no success

---------- Post updated at 05:37 AM ---------- Previous update was at 04:14 AM ----------

Actually I am interested only in the first.

grep -n 'pattern ' inputfile | read number_var junk
echo $number_var

ISTHERE=`grep -n total tmp.tmp3 | head -1 | cut -d : -f 1`