To display the selected part in line of text file [closed]

Question

I have the following in a text file:

0400903071220312  20120322 20:21
1TRANTELSTRAFLEXCAB22032012CMP201323930000812201108875802100A003485363          12122011AUS          182644             000C28122011        0000                     000

How can I pull just the 3071 out of the first line?

Answer 1

You don't say how you want to determine what's displayed, but -o shows only the matched expression, so grep -o 3071 file would just display the 3071.

Answer 2

To get the data from this position in a text file, you could use a tiny awk-script

awk '{print substr($0,7,4); exit;}' yourfilename

or work with head and cut

head -1 yourfilename | cut -c7-10