awk field (was Re: (no subject))

[Warren Block]

On Wed, 8 Apr 2009, Len Conrad wrote:

>
> We need to print a line when the 3rd field (with trailing ";" delimiter) is, eg, exactly 5 lower case characters
>
> awk ' $3 ~ /^[a-z]{5,5};$/ {print $0} ' file
>
> ... doesn't work.
>
> Suggestions?

Please give an example of the line this doesn't work on, and exactly 
what you want it to do.

"{5}" is probably acceptable instead of "{5,5}".  I don't do much awk, 
but here's a Perl example:

perl -e '$x = "abcde;"; print "Yes\n" if $x =~ /^[a-z]{5};$/'

-Warren Block * Rapid City, South Dakota USA