question on grep command

[Narasimham]

I am working on HP-UX
I have a file as follows
Record 1
--------
Name:
address:
Phone:
Phone:
Record 2
--------
.

From the above in shell programming How do i grep for the first occurance of the string "phone:". Any body can help


Thanks
Narasimham

[Darrell Allen · Accepted solution]

Hi Narasimham,

If you only want the first occurance of "phone:" do:

grep "phone:" file | head -1

If "phone:" must be at the beginning of the line use "^phone:".

Darrell

[A. Clay Stephenson]

This is a little bit more complicated if what you really want, is the first 'Phone:' after each 'Name:'. If that is the case, then a little bit of Perl or Awk will be your best bet. Is this what you are really trying to do?

Regards, Clay

[H.Merijn Brand (procura]

1. With grep, you can also add '-i' for case-insensative searches Phone vs phone

2. To get the first Phone: from each /Record:/

perl -ne '/^Record\s+(\d+)/ and $rn=$1,next;$rn&&/^Phone/i or next;print;$rn=0;' datafile