select rows based on column contents

[grinder182533]

Hi
My pipe delimited .txt file contains rows with 10 columns.
Can anyone advise how I output to file only those rows with the letters ‘ci’
as the first 2 characters in the 3rd column ?
Many thanks

 

[lotuseclat79]

Hi grinder182533,

I would cat the .txt file into a pipe, and then use (nawk, gawk, or awk) to filter only the 3rd column with the first two letters 'ci'.

Example:
$ cat file.txt | nawk '{ if substr($3,1,2) = "ci"; print $0 }'

-- Tom

 

[angel115]

nawk '{ if substr($3,1,2) = "ci"; print $0 }' -f file.txt

Would be a bit faster.

Avoiding using 'cat' is always better.