I am given a file with a list of names for the first 20 characters. The 20 characters after is a list of names that somebody is supposed to team up with.

Now i'm trying to write a simple script that will read a name somebody inputs and then looks only in the first 20 characters.

For example. (Due to the nature of BBS posting length of columns are not given, the first name is the desired target for searching, the second name is the person teamed up with the first.

John Bow : Lucy Hemmings
Bob Billy : Bibliotheque Frenchness
Lucy Hemmings : John Bow

if somebody inputs John, I would get both Lucy and John, and this is not what I want. Any ideas?

I am considering piping grep -w with something else as it seems to at least cut out all the names which have no relevance.

The extra whitespace in that sample is sort of hard to write something exacting. But yeah grep and pipe are the solutions imo.

grep -i -E "^$NAME " $FILE | cut -f2 -d:

in_file=/path/to/file
read input
awk -v name=$input -F: 'tolower($1) ~ name { print $2 }' $in_file