Shell Programming and Scripting

hi there,

I am a complete newb to bash but am going to try and make a script to help me seach text files for strings of interest, any help that one of you gurus could pass on will be greatly received!!

I want to write something like:

in "text1.txt" find "string1" and copy out the line output to a new text file
e.g.
string1 this is the data that follows on from string1 for approximately 230 chars

I will eventually make the script more intelligent but this is just a start.

Thanks in advance people

For something like this I have to ask if this is home-/coursework?

Code:

man grep

more simlpy add below line to script

Code:

 grep string1 text1.txt >newfile

Hi and welcome to the forum and Unix community.
grep(1) is the tool you are looking for.

Code:

grep string1 text1.txt

will output all lines that contain 'string1'

grep is a filter -- it is line based. It reads in a line, does a search, and prints the line if found; and takes the next line to process.

You can use -A<num> option to get <num> lines After the match, like this:

Code:

grep -A3 string file

string to search for needs to be in double quotes if it contains spaces. Same for file. You can use variables, of course:

Code:

str="pattern to search for"
grep "$str" someFile.txt

Look at the manual pages to find about grep's options on your system.

Code:

man grep

Hi,
thanks for help.

Its not for homework (I'm 34) lol

I am trying to learn to make scripts to analyse text files that are output from automatic surveys.

Thanks people

Try:

Code:

perl -ln0e '/string1.{230}/gs;print $&' file