awk question

[Oliver Fromme]

Len Conrad <lconrad at go2france.com> 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.  

If ";" is the delimiter character, you need to tell awk
about it (i.e. use the -F option).  This one should work:

awk  -F';'  '$3 ~ /^[a-z]{5}$/ {print}'  file

If that still doesn't work for you, please specify your
file format more exactly, and provide an example of the
input lines.

Best regards
   Oliver

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