USING AWK TO SEARCH AND PRINT FIELDS

[johngiggs]

I use nawk to search for a string in a particular field and then print that particular field, however if for some reason, the string I want to print is in the next field, it will not print it.

Ex. cat file | nawk '$5 ~ /TEST/{print $5, $6}'

This works fine when TEST is in the 5th field, however if TEST appears in the 6th field, I would like to print the 6th and 7th fields.

How can I use awk to do this?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

John

 

[marsd]

How about this:
for (i=5 ; i < NF ; i++) {
if ($i ~ /TEST/) {
print $i, $(i + 1)
}
}

 

[iribach]

my version:

/TEST/{ # found TEST, which field contains it ?
for(iii = NF; $iii !~ /TEST/; --iii);
print $iii, $(iii+1);
next; # not really needed, but for clarity
}
#PS: NOT TESTED
#PPS: i don't like variable names like 'i'
# how do you changes that 'i' to 'iii'
# in a xTousend-lines code file ?

 

[bookclass]

$5 ~ /TEST/ {print $5, $6}
$5 !~ /TEST/ && $6 ~ /TEST/ {print $6, $7}
#Not really clear on the problem: specific (like this), or general?