Get the exact string - not the entire line using grep

[yuga devi]

Hi,


Is there any command in unix, to grep the exact word from a file, not the entire line. I have tried using grep -w, but it returns the entire line.

For ex, my file consists of

Log14534|0A353C0B.4A9282E3.00012623.00002EBE|[color=red]123456789|START TRANSACTION|host1|Mon Aug 24 08:56:27 EDT 2009|[/color]

In this, i want to grep, dynamically passing the unique no "123456789" and need to ge the word, "START TRANSACTION".

Please help.
-- Yuga

[yuga devi]

Hi, -sorry for the confusion in the highlighted color


Is there any command in unix, to grep the exact word from a file, not the entire line. I have tried using grep -w, but it returns the entire line.

For ex, my file consists of

Log14534|0A353C0B.4A9282E3.00012623.00002EBE|123456789|START TRANSACTION|host1|Mon Aug 24 08:56:27 EDT 2009|

In this, i want to grep, dynamically passing the unique no "123456789" and need to ge the word, "START TRANSACTION".

Please help.
-- Yuga

[Ulf Dittmer]

grep is line-oriented - it can't return partial results. But you can pipe its output into another tool -like sed or awk- that can extract parts of lines.

[Stefan Wagner]

yuga devi wrote:Log14534|0A353C0B.4A9282E3.00012623.00002EBE|123456789|START TRANSACTION|host1|Mon Aug 24 08:56:27 EDT 2009|

In this, i want to grep, dynamically passing the unique no "123456789" and need to ge the word, "START TRANSACTION".

egrep is the extended grep to match regular expressions.
-o is a switch to output only matching parts.

I understood that you search for 12..9 and want the next string as result.

echo "
Log14534|0A353C0B.4A9282E3.00012623.00002EBE|123456789|START TRANSACTION|host1|Mon Aug 24 08:56:27 EDT 2009|
" | egrep -o "123456789\|[A-Z ]+\|" 
123456789|START TRANSACTION|

The pipesymbol | has to be masked, because egrep would else threat it as OR.

Result: 123456789|START TRANSACTION|