grep command

[Tracey]

The hostnames in my hosts file usually have a tab after the name. The following works for me:

grep "hp1[ ]" hosts

The first character in the brackets is a space, the second character is where I pressed the tab key (on my system it actually show many more spaces) That way it will get those that end in spaces or those that end in a tab character.

[Laurent Paumier]

How about rewriting the whole script ?
Here's what you could du using awk :

awk '
BEGIN {
while (getline <"/etc/hosts") {
for (i=1;i<=NF;i++) {
host[$i]=$0
}
}
while (getline <"/tmp/hplist") {
printf("%s\n",host[$0])
}
}' >/tmp/list

[Tarek]

That's it Robin!!! The second code was the right one.
I tried also yours Laurent, it works, but there are some entries that aren't found.
However i'd like to learn something about using awk, it seems very powerful, is there some tutorial on the net?
Thanks both, and of course thanks to all for your kindly help.
Regards
Tarek

[Robin Wakefield]

Tarek, try:

http://vectorsite.tripod.com/tsawk0.html

Robin