UNIX for Beginners Questions & Answers

It helps to know what operating system and shell you're using since the utilities on various operating systems have options that might help with what you are trying to do that are not available on other operating systems. Whenever you start a new thread here, please always tell us what shell and operating system you're using.

We need a much clearer definition of what you consider to be a word starting with "s" or "S". Is a word just alphabetic characters? Can hyphens be included in a word (e.g., sub-sonic)? Can numeric characters be included in a word (e.g., "straight-6")? Can apostrophes be included in a word (e.g., "she's")? When apostrophes can be included in words, how are we to distinguish between a phrase surrounded by single-quotes and a word containing a hyphen? (Note that regular expressions in grep can only look at a single line and quoted strings can cross many line boundaries.)

And, if we can't see a sample of the data you're working with and the output you expect to get from it, we have no way to verify that anything we might suggest might work for you. Please give us a representative sample input and the corresponding exact output you hope to produce from that input.