Unix & Linux Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for users of Linux, FreeBSD and other Un*x-like operating systems. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
I have a sometextfile.txt with '|' as delimiter.
I would like to grep the value from last column only which consist of word "apple". How do i do it?
column1|column2|column3|column4|column5|column6|column7
aaaaaaa|bbbbbbb|ccccccc|ddddddd|eeeeeee|fffffff|apple
and grep whole row to a Newfile.txt
Another awk approach:
awk -F\| '$NF ~ /^apple$/' infile.txt >toOutput.txt
~ regexp match rather than a strict == equivalence match (so will, e.g. also match pineapple and apples, and anything else containing apple). You weren't 100% clear on this so that may or may not be what you actually want. ASHFIN's version also relies on the default/implicit action of awk (which is to print the current line), while mine has {print} explicitly in the script - that makes no real difference, I only included print in mine to make it clearer what the script is doing.
– cas
Aug 2 '17 at 6:16
awk -F'|' '$NF == "apple" {print}' sometextfile.txt > Newfile.txt
Using | as the field separator, for each line of sometextfile.txt if the last field ($NF) equals "apple", print the whole line. Redirect output to Newfile.txt
If you want to test for a specific column rather than the last column, use $n where n is the column number. In this example, $NF is equivalent to $7, and $6 would contain fffffff
The original question asked for a grep solution. To find the last column, search for a word which does not have the delimiter [^|]+ forward to end-of-line $:
grep -Eo "[^|]+$" infile.txt
Output:
column7
apple
The straight solution is to anchor your expression at the end with a $:
grep "|apple$" sometextfile.txt > Newfile.txt
If this doesn't find the lines, the typical reason is a DOS-formatted text file with trailing carriage returns at the line endings. You can catch that case by allowing trailing non-printable characters at the end (supposing your regex support \s):
grep "|apple\s*$" sometextfile.txt > Newfile.txt
