If you're going to use two greps, with the fixed strings needed for this project, grep -F (or fgrep) will be faster than egrep (or grep -E). I.e., try:

Code:

grep -F ' setting application ' file1.txt | grep -vF '@mead' > tempfile.txt

If you don't want to do this just with shell built-ins as MadeInGermany suggested, you could also use either of the following awk scripts (that just need one invocation of awk):

Code:

awk -F'@msad' 'NF == 1 && / setting application /' file1.txt > tempfile.txt
awk '/ setting application / && ! /@msad/' file1.txt > tempfile.txt

Note, however, that with the supplied sample data from post #1 in file1.txt, none of the above produce any output.

All of these (and the sample code shown in post #1 are looking for setting application , but the desired lines in that sample data have applicaction instead of application

To get the output requested in post #1 from the input provided in post #1, you would need to use one of the following:

Code:

grep -F ' setting applicaction ' file1.txt | grep -vF '@mead' > tempfile.txt
awk -F'@msad' 'NF == 1 && / setting applicaction /' file1.txt > tempfile.txt
awk '/ setting applicaction / && ! /@msad/' file1.txt > tempfile.txt