Shell Programming and Scripting

I've seen dozens of similar threads but none seem to match what I'm looking for and I can't seem to make sense of how to do this so any help would be immensely appreciated.

I am running a command that generates this output:

Code:

Mike Smith
Mike Smith Alaska
Mike Smith Washington
Mike Smith Alaska Common
Mike Smith Washington State

I am trying to just grep "Mike Smith" but I get a match with all the other lines that contain those characters in addition to other words

I've tried variations of grep -x -w -o, etc without success.

I have also tried sed but I must confess that I do not understand the language enough to formulate a command that will give me what I need.

Does anyone have any suggestions on how I might be able to accomplish this?

Thank you
Mike

on edit: I am not just trying to grep the shortest line or just the name. At some point I might need to grep a different line that has various matches too. I just need to know how to grep exactly what I input...no more and no less.

Use awk:-

Code:

awk '$0=="Mike Smith"' filename

If you want to get what is exactly in a line of text

Code:

grep '^Mike Smith$' somefile

This means: precisely at the start of the line (^) find the string "Mike Smith" and "$" means that the end of the line is where the "$" is. No extra spaces or tabs.

Thanks for the replies These are the results:

===========================================

Code:

[root@eltreum tmp]# cat file.tmp
Mike Smith
Mike Smith Alaska
[root@eltreum tmp]# cat file.tmp|awk '$0=="Mike Smith"'
[root@eltreum tmp]#

===========================================

Code:

[root@eltreum tmp]# cat file.tmp |grep '^Mike Smith$'
[root@eltreum tmp]#

===========================================

can't seem to get it.

There will be control characters in your file, can you post the result of this command:-

Code:

cat -Ev file.tmp

Code:

[root@eltreum tmp]# cat -Ev file.tmp
Mike Smith$
Mike Smith Alaska$

PLs use code tags as advised.
The commands work. So it must be within your file. Pls post output of od -tx1 -a file.tmp.