First, I am trying to search for certain string types within a very large file. Here is a sample record:

Code:

MyCountry|MyGroup|MyCust|Run-Date|N/A|SERVER|OS|USERID|897//123456//LNAME FNAME|STATE|LLOGON

In field 9 I am looking for invalid formats. A valid format would be 897/C/123456//LNAME FNAME. The leading 897 can be numeric or it can be character (897 or US, these are country codes).

I am trying to convert a grep regexp search into an awk search with little success. The reason being is that I have to read in the line with grep, then test the variable, then print out the whole line. I figured with awk I could be doing the whole thing with one line and I could get rid of a slow "while read LINE;do" statement which makes my script extremely slow. Below are my two line examples:

GREP:

Code:

cat SID-Removed.csv | cut -d"|" -f9 |grep -ih '[[:alnum:]]\{2,3\}"//"[[:alnum:]]\{6\}'   (this one finally worked)

Note: I had tried

Code:

grep -ih '[[:alnum:]]\{2,3\}//[[:alnum:]]\{6\}'

but it did not produce the desired results

AWK:

Code:

awk -F'|' 'BEGIN { search_regex = "[[:alnum:]]\{2,3\}//[[:alnum:]]\{6\}" }tolower($9) ~ search_regex  {print $0}' SID-Removed.csv

I even tried this:

Code:

awk -F'|' 'BEGIN { search_regex = "[[:alnum:]]\{2,3\}\/\/[[:alnum:]]\{6\}"  }tolower($9) ~ search_regex  {print $0}' SID-Removed.csv

The awk statement finds 897/C/123456/LNAME FNAME, but it does not find the ones where the second element of that string is blank (897//123456//LNAME FNAME). Can anyone help me figure out what i'm doing wrong?

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