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I have a file (file_name) which contains exactly one occurance of the string Result:, at the start of a line. I want to print all the characters after the string Result: in that line until I encounter a space. Which shell command should I use?

grep "Result: " file_name | tail -c +9

is not working.

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3 Answers

up vote 6 down vote accepted

The simplest way would be to use awk.

awk '/^Result: / {print $2}' file_name

That matches lines that begin with Result:, and prints the second field in the file, as defined by the default $IFS, which is whitespace.

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There is a blank behind the colon : and afaik, the word before the next colon is searched. – user unknown Nov 7 '11 at 4:39
the OP doesn't mention a second colon. Just that the string ocurring between Result: and the next space are what is desired. Awk will by default break up the line on white space. $1 = "Result:", $2 = the next word. Which is what the OP requested to extract. – Tim Kennedy Nov 7 '11 at 5:10
Sorry - I meant 'before the next blank'. Your command results for the line Result:two bla nk in bla. – user unknown Nov 7 '11 at 5:29
I have updated my example to specifically include the space after the colon following Result: . This will now ignore lines like that in your example, and more closely match the initial request of the OP. – Tim Kennedy Nov 7 '11 at 5:40
up vote 3 down vote

Sounds like what you want is:

sed -ne 's/^Result: \([^ ]*\).*/\1/p' file_name

Matches against the line with "Result: " and prints the first word after it. Other lines are not displayed.

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2  
The OP stated that "Result: " has only one occurrence in the file. It could be anchored with ^, but is unnecessary. – Arcege Nov 7 '11 at 6:29
up vote 0 down vote 
tillblank=$(egrep -o "^Result: [^ ]* " file)
echo ${tillblank/*:/}

egrep -o only outputs the pattern you searched for. The next line removes everything up to the colon.

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The OP asks to get only the word after "Result: ", not the entire line. – Arcege Nov 7 '11 at 6:30
Yes - the first line one grabs the matching pattern, and the second line removes the "Result: " from the beginning. Doesn't it work for you? What do you get? – user unknown Nov 7 '11 at 18:23
If the line is Result: 2 apples, then your's would get 2 apples, not 2 as the OP suggested. – Arcege Nov 8 '11 at 0:46
No. egrep -o only grabs Result: 2 - the second line removes the Result:. Did you test it? You should! – user unknown Nov 8 '11 at 1:45

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