Hi all,

I would like to extract records of a file based on a condition. The file contains 47 columns, and I would like to extract only those records that match a certain value in one of the columns, e.g.


COL1 COL2 COL3 ............... COL47
 1 XX 45 N
 2 YY 34 y
 3 ZZ 44 N
 4 XX 89 Y
 5 XX 45 N
 6 YY 84 D
 7 ZZ 22 S

From this file, I would like to extract all records whose COL2=XX or YY, and all other records will be excluded (as shown below).

COL1 COL2 COL3 ............... COL47
 1 XX 45 N
 2 YY 34 y
 4 XX 89 Y
 5 XX 45 N
 6 YY 84 D

Does anybody know how to do this using sed or awk or any other UNIX tool? Thank you.

--
Charlie Harvey's website - linux, perl, java, anarchism and punk rock: http://charlieharvey.org.uk

Hi,
  I got same situation but i can't use awk program. I can only use SED command.
    Is it possible to filter rows with sed command

temp.txt
1;a;200
2;b;300
3;a;400
4;c;800
5;b;900

Now i want to filter on second field if field is equal to "a" or "b" then display rows otherwise throw it.

is it doable?