Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi all,

Im trying to use grep to match a exact mask where some characters are known and some are not. for example:

Code:

j***n@email.com

in this case the length is known and the position of the unknown characters are know (and will be [a-z-0-9])

any idea how I can do this? the file list is not just the email address on the line it has other text and code around it also, but returning the entire line is fine.

thanks

Moderator's Comments:

Please use CODE tags as required by forum rules!

Hello flamer,

Welcome to UNIX and LINUX forums hope you will enjoy learning and sharing knowledge here. Since you have not shown any samples so couldn't test following code. Could you please try following and let me know if this helps you.

Code:

awk 'match($0,/[a-zA-Z]+@[a-zA-Z]+\.com/){print substr($0,RSTART,RLENGTH)}'  Input_file

NOTE: on a Solaris/SunOS system, change awk to /usr/xpg4/bin/awk , /usr/xpg6/bin/awk , or nawk.

Thanks,
R. Singh

How about

Code:

grep -Eo "j[a-z0-9]{3}n@email.com" file

Perfect! thankyou.