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From: jik@athena.mit.edu (Jonathan I. Kamens)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions
Subject: Re: Attn: AWK GURUS (Generic Search)
Message-ID: <1991Feb28.044421.23405@athena.mit.edu>
Date: 28 Feb 91 04:44:21 GMT
References: <354@marst2>
Sender: news@athena.mit.edu (News system)
Organization: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Lines: 18


  It seems to me that if your database contains simply lines with certain
characters in each column, and you want to search for lines matching a
specified pattern of characters, the simplest thing to use is grep.

  You gave an example of finding "only the records with (a) in col1, (nop) in
col19-21, (v) in col29 and (y) in col34."  How about:

    grep "^a.................   .......v....y" database-filename

Read the man page for grep if you don't understand the periods in the regular
expression above.

-- 
Jonathan Kamens			              USnail:
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