Shell Programming and Scripting

pattern matching porblem.

I have a file with lines like this:

hdisk2 blah 03
hdisk3 blah 03
hdisk21 blat 06
hdisk23 blah 06
hdisk210 blat 06

So I want to grep for just hdisk2, but I get back as you would expect
hdisk2
dhsik21
hdisk23
hdisk210

I tried several techniques with -w and -e and all sorts of combos of " and '

The only success I had was pattern matching versus the entire line... but if I know I want hdisk2 and don't know how the rest of the line will look, that doesn't help me.

Help!

Why doesn't grep -w work? What output are you expecting?

Code:

$ grep -w ^hdisk2 file1
hdisk2 blah 03

Or:

Code:

fgrep -ow hdisk2 file1
hdisk2