Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!rutgers!noao!arizona!rupley
From: rupley@arizona.edu (John Rupley)
Newsgroups: comp.sources.wanted
Subject: Re: A column oriented (as in cut) grep command
Summary: Do it with awk (1) -- correction 1.0 |-)
Message-ID: <7251@megaron.arizona.edu>
Date: 30 Sep 88 09:47:11 GMT
References: <1725@teksce.SCE.TEK.COM> <871@dlhpedg.co.uk>
Organization: U of Arizona CS Dept, Tucson
Lines: 24

In article <871@dlhpedg.co.uk>, cl@datlog.co.uk (Charles Lambert) writes:
> 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

To get _column_ 2, filename and line number, try:

	awk '{print FILENAME ":" NR ":" substr($0, column, 1)}' column=2 foo

 
John Rupley
    internet: rupley@megaron.arizona.edu
    uucp: ..{cmcl2 | hao!ncar!noao}!arizona!rupley
    Dept. Biochemistry, Univ. Arizona, Tucson  AZ  85721