search for data in a file column

[John Carver]

I need to write into a script a search process that looks for data in a particular column of a file.
Attached is a small sample of what I am working with. Every now and then a damaged file shows up under the Damaged column heading.
I have not been successful in using sort or awk because there is data under the column heading only if there is a damaged file.

[Rodney Hills · Accepted solution]

With "awk" you can use substr to look at a specific column-
awk 'substr($0,30,1)="1"{print "bad line",$0}' yourfile

HTH

-- Rod Hills

[H.Merijn Brand (procura]

# perl -ane '@F==7&&$F[1]>0&&$F[2]>0&&print' your_data_file
INDEX.ADR.LINE.CITY 1 2 123 1 15503 1024
#

Enjoy, have FUN! H.Merijn

[Keith Clark]

At first I thought that you may be able to do something similar to what procura has done, but using the awk NF (number of fields) parameter. But I don't think you can consistently get the right answer, since Dynamic Modulo is sometimes empty as well. Is the original file tab delimited? That may help. If not, can you pad the columns with zeros?

[John Carver]

Once I added the second "=" character, the command returns any lines that have a single character length string of "1" in position 30.

awk 'substr($0,30,1)=="1"{print "bad line",$0}' myfile

Thanks for the help!