Shell Programming and Scripting

I have been looking for a good method to do the following. I would like to check a file to verify two lines exist that start with yyy and verify other lines that start with yyy do not exist in file test1. If the other lines starting with yyy do exist I would like the script to echo “not remove” the lines that were found that should not exist. I would also like to verify and echo the lines starting with yyy that should exist. I want lines yyy111 and yyy222 and check for lines yyy*.

Example file contents:
aaa111
bbb111
ccc111
yyy111
yyy222
yyy333
yyy444
yyy555
yyy666

Thanks for any help.
Elijah

Well, where are you stuck? What have you tried so far?

From what I understood, you have a file containing lines like:

Code:

aaa111
bbb111
ccc111
yyy111
yyy222
yyy333
yyy444
yyy555
yyy666

and then you want to echo "not remove" in front of the lines with yyy111 and yyy222 and "whatever" (whatever might be empty-string!!) in front of the other "yyy" lines. If this is what you want to do, try this:

Code:

awk '{if ($0~/^yyy111/ || $0~/^yyy222/) print "not remove "$0; else if ($0~/^yyy/) print "whatever"$0; else print $0;}' file.txt

Thanks unilover.
I was looking at using grep sending to a VAR and getting over complicated with it. I definitely need to learn to use the power of awk. This is what I needed.