(old)Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

Posted: **Tue 09 Feb 2010, 12:52**

Dear all,

Please help this dummy, I want to grep an exact number, how to do that? And yes, I am stupid.

Example:
in a file you have lines numbered from 1 to 100, you want to grep exactly line number 9, but I do:

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grep 9 /path/to/file.txt

I will get lines numbered 9, 19, 29, etc But I want only line number 9

Thanks

Posted: **Tue 09 Feb 2010, 13:18**

you can use sed:

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sed -n '9p' /path/to/file.txt

Posted: **Tue 09 Feb 2010, 16:21**

Trio,

Also,

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grep -w 9 /path/to/file.txt

The "-w" matches a single word only

s

Posted: **Wed 10 Feb 2010, 09:10**

If the number "9" is at the beginning of a line, you can check for that:

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grep '^9' filename

... of if it's followed with a space, you can check for that:

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grep '9 ' filename

or combine the two, etc. grep will do fairly complex regular expressions, so you can look for a "9" at the beginning of a line, followed by, say, a capital letter:

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grep '^9[A-Z]' filename

I think those are all correct, I'm not in a position to check them at the moment, but doco for grep is all over the 'net.

-Shel

Posted: **Wed 10 Feb 2010, 09:26**

Thx all...seaside's answer did the job