Thread: Using the grep command to find lines

Hi

I have used the grep function to display all the lines of a file that displays a particular word, Now i want to display all the lines that display a list of numbers.

For this data set. grip 11837054|60497718|46891756| file .This will read all the lines congaing these numbers. However if i have 5000 numbers i would like to display lines for i would have to individually type in 5000 number combinations. Is there any quicker way of doing this?

MemberID ClaimsTruncated DaysInHospital AgeAtFirstClaim Sex
11837054 0 0 70-79 M
60497718 1 1 70-79 M
46891756 0 1 70-79 M
31394988 0 0 40-49 M
69389881 0 0 0-9 M
276553 0 0 40-49 F
41304691 0 0 30-39 M
29061798 0 0 70-79 F
67052973 0 0 40-49
19834466 0 0 0-9 M

I'm assuming that the sample table provided is stored in a text file. If so it is quite easy. Read the file, get first column (field), and give it to grep. However, grep will not accept 5000 argument on line due to command line arg. You can feed number one by one as you read from the file.

Code:

while IFS= read -r line
do 
  awk '{ print $1}'  | xargs -I {} grep  "{}" file
done < "input_file.txt"