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[smicro]

Have a file that one line reads

848844 retyor toyoyih W=9099 eoeoe

One of the lines will always contain W=
I can grep for W= but it pulls out the entire line, how do I grep for this to just pull out W=9099
The columns and position of W= are changing constantly, tired using awk.

 

[longhair]

smicro,
something like

cp /dev/nul /yourfolder/yournewfilename
cat /yourfolder/yourfilename | while read column1 column2 column3 column4 column5
do
if column4 = "W=9099"
then
print column4 >> yournewfilename
fi
done

untested but should work
regards,
longhair

 

[jgunkel]

Faster, use if you have gnu grep, let grep both filter and slice and dice:

grep -o 'W=\w*' < inputfile.log

Example to test with:

echo -e "foo bar W=zot blah grunt\nmoo\n cow\n grunt W=783737 groan\nrabbit dog W= basselope" | grep -o 'W=\w*'

will output:

W=zot
W=783737

Cheers!

 

[jgunkel]

More portable, if you don't have gnu grep:

grep -E 'W=\w*' | sed -e 's/^.*\(W=[01-9a-zA-Z]*\).*/\1/'

Example to test with:

echo "foo bar W=zot blah grunt\nmoo\n cow\n grunt W=783737 groan\n" | grep -E 'W=\w*' | sed -e 's/^.*\(W=[01-9a-zA-Z]*\).*/\1/'

will output:

W=zot
W=783737

 

[smicro]

Cool thanks jgunkel!