Shell Programming and Scripting

The Sed/Grep command is really confusing me. I know I'm missing something that should be really easy to fix. My program displays multiple names after I ask it to display only one, How do I get it to do only one??

it looks like this:

Please enter a name to display?
>> John

(A list then appears)
1. John Doe
2. John Smith
3. John James
Please enter the record that you would like to display on separate page?
>> 3

And then John James should appear on a separate page like this
my code looks like this:

echo "Please enter a name to display \c"
read name

#Displays all of the names with their record number
grep -in $name phonebook

#Enter the record number to display on separate page
echo "Enter the record number of the name you want to display \c"
read number

record=`grep -i $number phonebook` (I'm Pretty sure this is the error)

clear

grep -in "$name" phonebook | sed -n -e 's/^/\
/' -e 's/:/\
/gp'

Can you show us what the format of the phonebook file is?

there's nothing in the phone book file except the names of the people.

1. John Doe:1234 Main Street: City:State
2. John Smith: Address:City:State
3. John Something: Address: City: State

phonebook.txt

Code:

1. John Doe:1234 Main Street: City:State:ZIP
2. John Smith: Address:City:State:ZIP
3. John Something: Address: City: State:ZIP

nawk -v idx=1 -f toe.awk phonebook
OR
nawk -v idx=3 -f toe.awk phonebook

toe.awk:

Code:

BEGIN {
  FS=":"
  OFS=ORS
  SEP=","
  idxI="^" idx "."

}

$0 ~ idxI {
    name=substr($1, index($1, " ")+1)
    print idx, name, $2, $3 SEP $4 SEP $5
}

I'm not familiar with awk at all !

is there a simplified way such as a grep/sed select statement that can work??

Code:

echo -e "Please enter a name to display \c"
read name

#Displays all of the names with their record number
grep -in $name phonebook.txt

#Enter the record number to display on separate page
echo -e "Enter the record number of the name you want to display \c"
read number

record=`grep "^$number" phonebook.txt`

clear

echo $record | sed -n -e 's/^/\
/' -e 's/:/\
/gp'

HTH,
tyler_durden

this will print the first matching pattern of a file ..

sed -n '/John/{p;q;}' test1.txt