Hi. First post here.

I'm relatively new to UNIX (Solaris8) and writing my first real script, but I seem to have hit a brick wall. The odd thing is that it seems like it should be a simple task....but not with UNIX apparently.

I've got a large text file: 14000 lines with 10 columns.

I want to search the file purely on column 8 for a particular word, but if that word occurs I want to print the whole line.

If I 'grep' for the word it will show up in the other columns too, but I'm only interested in occurances in column 8.

What I need is something like grep $8 <word> <filename> but of course that command doesn't exist. nawk only deals with columns and won't give me the whole line.

Is there any way I can do this?

Thanks