Path: utzoo!utgpu!attcan!uunet!mcvax!ukc!stc!datlog!dlhpedg!cl From: cl@datlog.co.uk (Charles Lambert) Newsgroups: comp.sources.wanted Subject: Re: A column oriented (as in cut) grep command Summary: Do it with awk(1) Message-ID: <871@dlhpedg.co.uk> Date: 28 Sep 88 14:49:52 GMT References: <1725@teksce.SCE.TEK.COM> Sender: news@dlhpedg.co.uk Reply-To: cl@datlog.co.uk (Charles Lambert) Organization: FSD@Data Logic Ltd, Queens House, Greenhill Way, Harrow, London. Lines: 22 I'm posting this, rather than mailing to the originator, because you awk(1) experts may want to correct it. In article <1725@teksce.SCE.TEK.COM> johnhi@teksce.SCE.TEK.COM (John Higley) writes: > >Does anybody know of a version of grep that can be limited to certain columns >in a text file? What I am thinking about is something that would have >options such as -c and -f in the cut command. > >That reminds me, it would also be nice if it could tell the line number that >the match was found on. "Awk" is designed to do this kind of job. An awk(1) command to find a pattern in column two and print the line numbers would look something like this: awk '$2 ~ /egrep-pattern/ {printf "%d: ", NR; print}' file Putting this in a shell script with appropriate argument-passing would give you the tool you need. ---------- Charlie