UNIX for Advanced & Expert Users

Hi,
everybody this is my pattern in a file

thomson, nicolas 5-3871
Wong, Fred 4-4123
Jones, Thomas 1-4122
Salazar, Richard 5-2522

first name and last names of people fallowed by Tele.

while i am searching for pattern first name begin with 'S' and last name begin with 'R' letter it's not working with my command like:
grep '^s*,+/t^r' patch.file
and also i want to search the lines where last name characters are 4.

please anybody help in this regard with explanation?

some one giving this command grep '^S[^ ]* R '
can anybody explain above command please

i did't get after ^s they are placing [^ ]* means what how it seperated the first name (begin with s) and last name (begin with R).

To be not limited to upper or lower case for s and r and also not limited to exactly one space between the "name, name", this could be an alternative:

Code:

awk ' $1 ~ /^[sS].*,/ && $2 ~ /^[rR]/ || $2 ~ /^....$/ {print}' infile

^ in the beginning stands for "Beginning of the line".
[^ ]* in this case ^ inside [] stands for "not" one of the following characters inside the square brackets, in this case means "not a blank" and the asterix stands for "many or none of the former character".
awk works with fields and has as standard field separator any kind and number of blanks which comes handy in this case. The fields are addressed by $1, $2 and so on.

Here some explanaiton on Regular Expressions:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_expression

Here something about awk:
http://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/manual/gawk.html

Thakyou very much

Code:

nawk '/^[Ss][^ ]*[Rr]/ || length($2) == 4' infile

Example given by the OP, get all those lines which start with S or s ^[Ss] and very next word should start with be R or r [Rr], [^ ]* means look until you find space that means next word.

Another one in sed:

Code:

sed -n '/S\(.*\), R\(.*\) [0-9]-\([0-9]\{4\}\)/p' < filename

i did't understand that part except that every thing is understood