UNIX for Advanced & Expert Users

Hello All,

I am trying to search one pattern across a file and then print it. But i need to delimit the search per line to 2 occurrences. How do i do that?

Regards.

Try...

Code:

 
awk -v var="searchstring" '{str=$0;cnt=gsub(var,arr);if(cnt==2)print str}' infile

Code:

perl -nle '{print $_ if scalar(@_ = $_ =~ /pattern/g) == 2}' infile

Hello malcomex999, Vi-Curious,

Thanks for the replies.I tried both the suggestions but none of them worked for me :-(. My file contains -

~/Desktop$ cat b.txt
hello hello hello hello
good morning
good evening

I am trying to search for hello string in this file and am expecting it to print 'hello' only twice in the output. Please let me know if i am doing something wrong there.

~/Desktop$ awk -v var="hello" '{str=$0;cnt=gsub(var,arr);if(cnt==2)print str}' b.txt
<No OutPut here>

~/Desktop$ perl -nle '{print $_ if scalar(@_ == $_ =~ /hello/g) == 2}' b.txt
<No OutPut here>

Regards.

A slight modification in the Vi-Curious does the trick.

Code:

perl -nle '{print "$_[0] $_[1]" if (@_ = $_ =~ /hello/g) }' b.txt

Or awk...

Code:

 
awk -v var="hello" '{cnt=gsub(var,arr);if(cnt>=2)print var,var}' infile

The reason there was no output was because the first occurrence of == in your example should have been just a single =. Others have already posted follow-up examples to your latest query so I'll just say that this would have printed the entire line if it contained exactly 2 occurrences of the search pattern. It wasn't clear from your initial post that you wanted to print out the first 2 occurrences of (only) the search pattern if it occurred 2 or more times in the line.