I'm on a Solaris box that doesn't have -o as an option for grep (trying to return match only).

Is there any way to get this functionality without the -o option?

I've tried both sed and awk doing something like:

echo "this is a test" | awk '/test/'
or
echo "this is a test | sed '/test/p'

-o, --only-matching Show only the part of a matching line that matches PATTERN

Can you provide more detail on what you are trying to do? I am not familiar with the grep -o option.

grep -o would return just the match... so, if I entered:

> echo "this is a test" | grep -o test
> test
or
> echo "this is a test" | grep -o "this is"
> this is

> testval="this is"
> echo "wow this is a test" | sed "s/$testval/~&~/" | tr "~" "\n" | grep "$testval"
this is

That is clever, but I don't know if it works for my situation, which is this:

I have a record that looks like:

acl add name=ACL_RULE_NAME pos=400 action=allow agent=proxy authneeded=no \
dest=netgroup:destinations_ssh destburb=external nataddr= \
service=ssh source=ipaddr:1.2.3.4 sourceburb=internal \
comments='this is comments' \
lastchangedby='changed by the guy'

while read line 
do
source=`grep -o "source=.* "`
dest=`grep -o "dest=.* "`
echo "$source $dest"
done

Given your sample with (n)awk you can do something like this:

$ cat file
acl add name=ACL_RULE_NAME pos=400 action=allow agent=proxy authneeded=no \
dest=netgroup:destinations_ssh destburb=external nataddr= \
service=ssh source=ipaddr:1.2.3.4 sourceburb=internal \
comments='this is comments' \
lastchangedby='changed by the guy'

eval  `nawk '/source=[^ ]*/
             /sourceburb=[^ ]*/
             /dest=[^ ]*/
             /destburb=[^ ]*/
             /name=[^ ]*/
             /service=[^ ]*/' RS=' '  file`

$ echo $source
ipaddr:1.2.3.4
$ echo $service
ssh
$ echo $name
ACL_RULE_NAME
$ echo $destburb
external
$ echo $dest
netgroup:destinations_ssh
$ echo $sourceburb
internal