UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

This may be a repetitive or simple question, but I have a long running code, which uses a grep with a big argument, and i was wondering if there was a way to replace all of my greps with awk....here are my two commands using greps.

Code:

x=$(ls /my/directory/here | grep -h ".$variable")

and

Code:

u=$(ls /my/directory/here | grep -E "\.20.{6}\.20")

the second seems to work particularly better than the first. Its purpose is to find all occurrences of .20 .20 with six characters in the middle. I do not think that either statement is very efficient, if an awk statement exist which would better replace these statements, and what these awk statements are.

Thank you.

unless you are only working with part of a line of the results (so we'd need a sample line and what you want to do with it, like which part of the data), then grep is what you want to use.