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From: jpr@dasys1.UUCP (Jean-Pierre Radley)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions
Subject: Re: Shell Database Management (?)
Keywords: shell database
Message-ID: <10650@dasys1.UUCP>
Date: 6 Sep 89 20:08:57 GMT
References: <10596@dasys1.UUCP>
Reply-To: jpr@dasys1.UUCP (Jean-Pierre Radley)
Distribution: usa
Organization: TANGENT
Lines: 27

In article <10596@dasys1.UUCP> parsnips@dasys1.UUCP (David Parsons) writes:
>I would like to use a Bourne shell script to extract records from a simple
>database of fixed-length fields terminated with a new-line character.
>The problem... the database consists of addresses... positions 99 and 100
>in each record contain a two-position abbreviation for the state.  It's easy
>to get cut to read those two characters, and grep to identify the state I
>want to extract, but how the ^#$&! do you then copy the ENTIRE record 
>thus identified to another file???  Using grep alone is no good because 
>the abbreviation appears in various other places in the record...

This is a one-liner for awk:

:statefinder
awk '
	{  if ("'$1'" == substr($0, 99, 2) )  print }
' $2


Thus if characters 99 and 100 of your line contain the state,
then typing
	
	statefinder NY datafile

should do what you want.
-- 
Jean-Pierre Radley					      jpr@jpradley.uucp
New York, NY					      72160.1341@compuserve.com