UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hi,

I would like to extract a pattern from a line. The first two characters will always be the same in this pattern, but the proceeding numbers will not be, and the pattern will always be 6 characters long. I would like to get the entire pattern up to a certain symbol, in this case, a period.

Here is an example of the $line:

1 3PLANELOC 1.32 4.84 30 0.9375 ROW 244.141 rawdata/SE000000.IM000004

In this case, I would like the pattern "SE00000" only. So far, all I can get is the last column of $line using awk:

Code:

echo $line | awk '{print $9}'

which yields:

rawdata/SE000000.IM000004

The other two components in the line, rawdata and IM000004, will not be the same each time the variable $line is updated.

If anyone has any suggestions, they would be greatly appreciated. Thank you in advance.

something like this ? grep -o 'SE[0-9]\{6\}' infile

Or if it should be from the last field and it always looks like that you could try:

Code:

awk -F'[./]' '{print $(NF-1)}'

Both of them work perfectly. Many thanks to you both.