Shell Programming and Scripting

well,i haven't use awk for a long time and i wrote that code without too much thinking,do u mean this kind of usage is seldom to see?I saw the man pages just now and it seems that ~ can be used as match a pattern either quoted by // or "".I used the "+" to catenate a string and a value,however,i'm not sure it's a right way,but it did gave a correct result here.

Remarkable. + is not a concatenation character in awk, but it does something here. But what?
....
I think I figured it out. The + sign forces what follows into numerical context, but also what procedes it. Non-numerical characters turn into 0 (zero) So it becomes equivalent to:

Code:

$1 ~ num

Thanks,your explanation is compelling.I didn't notice it

I tried both the snippet and it returns me nothing..

Are you on Solaris? What is you actual command and a sample of your actual input ?

I am using HP-UX.

The command I tried, where bs is the file name and 7203446151111 is teh unique number

OK, what does:

Code:

awk '$0~"^RMR\\*"k' k=7203446151111 bs

give or:

Code:

awk '$0~""k' k=7203446151111 bs

Is there an RMR line in the file with that number?