UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Trying to do a grep -v on a value in the 2nd column of text. So if the word apple appears in a line in the 2nd column, it would not show up when the file was cat. Seems like a simple enough operation but I just can't figure it out. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks in advance.

Code:

Are apples good for you. Are pears better for you. Is beer an alternative.

The output would be

Code:

Are pears better for you.  Is beer an alternative

It is best if you post a portion of the real text you are working on, instead of a fake imitation. Since your request is inconsistent[*] with the output shown, it is most likely that if someone gives you a solution base on it, you'll come back saying that it doesn't work on your actual text.


* inconsistency:
What it appears to not show up is a human delineated sentence instead of just the 2nd column

apples pears beer are all in the 2nd column.

Code:

awk '$2 !~ "apple"' RS="." ORS="." file
 Are pears better for you. Is beer an alternative.

What Aia is trying to tell you is:

You posted a single line of input. In this single line the second "word" (as per the IBM definition of "word", which is a sequence of nonblank characters delimited by blanks) is "apples". As "grep" works on lines (and lines alone!), the whole line would be either printed or not printed, depending on the regexp you feed it. If you create a regexp matching the second word "apple" (this would be perfectly possible) and you use the "-v" switch to suppress every line matched and print every line not matched, then the output of the single-line input would be empty.

What you want - as indicated by your sample output - is not to work on lines but on sentences. Precisely, you want to remove every sentence which has "apple" as the second word from the input. "Sentence" here means "a sequence of words, followed by a closing punctuation mark (full stop, question mark, exclamation mark, but not colon, comma or semicolon).

Is that so? If yes, we could provide an awk- or sed-script doing this. "grep" will never be able to do this at all.

I hope this helps.

bakunin