Shell Programming and Scripting

I am using ksh and looking for a simple way to print the entire row when a specific column contains specific infomation. I know I can use grep to find the information however I can not specify the column.

File test.txt contents:
Abc,223,223,223
efg,354,224,774
hij,354,2230,773
klm,154,223,775

I would like to list only all of the lines where the 3rd delimted filed contains the number 223:
Abc,223,223,223
klm,154,223,775

Does anyone have an idea on what I can use for this maybe awk?

No need to use awk. Define IFS and read each fields into separate variables and check 3rd field variable value:

Code:

#!/bin/ksh

while IFS=, read f1 f2 f3 f4
do
        [ $f3 -eq 223 ] && print "${f1},${f2},${f3},${f4}"
done < test.txt

You can use "grep" without problems, you just have to construe your regexp accordingly:

Code:

grep '^[^,]*,[^,]*,223,' /path/to/input

searches for "line start, followed by any number of non-',' followed by a ',' (=field1), followed by any number of non-',' followed by a ',' (=field2), followed by '223,' (=field3).

I hope this helps.

bakunin

bakunin, that works great! I never knew you could do that with grep. Any ideas how I could pull out infomation with both 223 or 224 or maybe another number? maybe like an egrep "'^[^,]*,[^,]*,223,'|'^[^,]*,[^,]*,224'"?

You can try this to capture multiple values:

Code:

grep -E '^[^,]*,[^,]*,(223|224),'

This is true but in fact it is even easier, when values are adjacent. You won't even need extended regexps for this:

Code:

grep  '^[^,]*,[^,]*,22[34],'

search for '...' followed by "22", followed by either a "3" or a "4".

Such "character ranges" can do many things, here are a few examples:

"[a-z]" search for a single lowercase character

"[0-9]" search for a single digit number

"[0-9]*[02468]" search for an even number

"+*[0-9][0-9]*[^.]*" search for a positive integer (an optional plus-sign, followed by a non-zero number of numeric digits, followed by anything except a comma)

I hope this helps.

bakunin

I hope this helps.

bakunin