sed?

[ericfjchen]

May you use sed to achieve the same as below,
---
awk -F: '{if(substr($1,4,1)=="k") print $1 }' /etc/passwd
---

[harry d brown jr]

Using sed is probably possible, but this works also:

cut -d":" -f1 /etc/passwd |grep "^...k"

live free or die
harry d brown jr

[harry d brown jr]

Here is the "sed only" solution:


sed -n -e 's/^\([^:]*\):.*/\1/' -e 's/\(^[A-Za-z0-9_]\{3,3\}k.*\).*/\1/p' /etc/passwd

live free or die
harry d brown jr

[Matti_Kurkela]

A shorter sed solution:
sed -n -e 's/^\([^:]\{3,3\}k[^:]*\):.*$/\1/p'
However, I prefer something like Harry's cut-and-grep solution in cases like this.