Is there a way to find a specific record among the whole line?
This is my file:
one two three four
two three four five
three four five six
four five six seven
five six seven eight
How do I search for all lines which include two?
awk '/(^| )two( |$)/' ...
The (..) groups there are trying to ensure we're only matching "two". At the front it either needs to be the beginning of the line or a space and at the end it needs to be a space or the end of the line. In short, we're making sure the field equals two.
Hmm apparently you can also use word-boundary tags (which looks slightly more elegant but isn't as portable):
awk '/<two>' ...
Not sure what your specific use-case is (I assume it's not numbers), you might be just as well off with grep -E '<two>' ... but awk will give you a bit more flexibility if you need to do other stuff.
