UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

How can I grep for a certain letter that only shows on the 3rd letter or character.

ex:
ASGHDY
SHTYRD
SDTYRD
IGIKGD

I only want the TY part of the 3rd character
so output would only be SHTYRD and DDTYRD - I only want the TY on the 3rd character.

THANKS

grep ^..TY file1

where "^" is the beginning of line and "." is any char

see man regexp for more detail

Ygor -

this is what i came up with so far...

awk '/****CA**/ {print $1,"PST",$2,$3,$4}' co | wc

I need the 5th and 6th character to define as either CA or AZ only.
I tried this:
awk '/****[CA, AZ]**/ {print $1,"PST",$2,$3,$4}' co | wc

But it does'nt seem to be filtering correctly.

You need to use something like...

awk '/^....(CA|AZ)/'

Ygor

the OR character only works on 2 item when using OR

I need to be able to select more than 2 item so I dont have to do it line by line or in this case state by state
....CA..
....WA..
....NV..
....OR..

my main goal is to add the timezone to each line but it depends on the 5th and 6th character because that is where I define the state.

so if line contains "^....CA or WA or NV" -> print fields etc

THANKS...

The man pages do seem to imply that "|" can only be used for two items, but you can do more...

awk '/^....(CA|WA|NV|OR)/'