Print column with AWK

Question

I am trying to find a way to use awk to start printing only once it finds the search parameter and print only a couple of columns following it.

To try to explain a little better I am looking over a log file that prints a lot of information as a single line. I want to take and extrapolate only certain aspects of that line. IE there's a big file with this line somewhere in it:

blahblah blah blah there is a lot of information here for name: John Doe and it just keeps on going and doesn't stop.

I want it to search for name and only print out:

name: John Doe

I know I can use the column segment, but I don't actually know where in that line name will be in different files.

Answer 1

The simplest answer would NOT involve awk. It would use grep, to output any matches of the word "name", and up to two words that follow:

grep -o 'name [A-Za-z]* [A-Za-z]*' filename

The -o switch includes only the parts that match, not the entire line; and the [A-Za-z]* tells that you are asking for a single word.

Let me know if you prefer to do this in awk-- but that would be much more complicated.

Answer 2

This can also be done with awk:

$ awk 'match( $0, /name [A-Z][a-z]* [A-Z][a-z]*/ ) { print substr( $0, RSTART, RLENGTH ) }' /path/to/inputfile

Answer 3

Perl solution:

perl -lne '/(name:\s+\w+\s+\w+)/ and print $1'

• \s matches whitespace characters (whitespaces per see, tabulations, etc.)
• \w matches letters and numbers
• -lne means don't print anything (n), except when print is used, output a newline in the end (l) and execute (e) the following

So the whole line will match name: followed by one or more whitespace character and one or more letter, again one or more whitespace character and one or more letter, and will then print that.