getting data from a file where you only know a partial match and dont want the full l

[cbillson]

lets say i have a file that has:


name=123 data=blah
name=124 data=blah
name=125 data=blah
name=126 data=blah
name=127 data=blah

i need to get "123" into a variable, so i could use a for loop and grep (cat myfile | grep "name=", but is there any way i can grep or only select the data up to the next space?

Also, when using arrays, if you split a line of data up into data[1] data[2] etc, and you have lets say up to data[30] is there any way to easily echo data[20] to data[30] without the obvious specifying every element - kind of like data[20]+

Cheers
Chris

[zazzle]

it's can be solved by writing a simple C program, use fgets() read lines from the data file and sscanf() get a variable equal to 123 and print this line with the first 8 bytes.

[codemaniac]

there is a split function in awk which splits an string into an array using a delimiter.


awk '{split($1,a,"="); var[$1] = a[2]} END{for (i in var) {print var[i]} }' sample.dat