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From: pfalstad@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Paul Falstad)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions
Subject: Re: Word-oriented GREP
Message-ID: <8283@idunno.Princeton.EDU>
Date: 15 Apr 91 03:33:23 GMT
References: <1991Apr15.014626.28903@berlioz.nsc.com>
Sender: news@idunno.Princeton.EDU
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Organization: League For Fighting Chartered Accountancy
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nelson@berlioz.nsc.com (Taed Nelson) wrote:
>When I use the command "grep V\[0-9\]\[0-9\]\[0-9\] fred.c" it returns
>  #define VERSION "V002"
>  or somesuch.  What I would really like is just the string of characters
>  which matched:
>  V002
>I thought about it for a while, and I couldn't come up with anything;  even
>  AWK seems to offer no nice way of doing it, but this seems like something
>  that is at least somewhat common...

It would seem so, but this is the simplest thing I could come up with:

sed -n 's/.*V\([0-9][0-9][0-9]\).*/V\1/p' fred.c

or (better, I think):

grep 'V[0-9][0-9][0-9]' fred.c | sed 's/.*V\([0-9][0-9][0-9]\).*/V\1/'

Doesn't work for multiple occurrences of Vxxx though.

I seem to remember something out of the perl man page which makes this
really simple.  Someone will post it perhaps.

--
              Paul Falstad  pfalstad@phoenix.princeton.edu
         And on the roads, too, vicious gangs of KEEP LEFT signs!
     If Princeton knew my opinions, they'd have expelled me long ago.