Thread: match a line when i have values from that line

hello. can someone plz help me find a way to match a line from a file that has text fields in it. i know the values of the text fields but the problem is that there is often random amounts of spaces between them so i never know how to search it properly, if i just put echo -e with \t it doesnt find anything. anyone??

hi,

Code:

[[:blank:]]*

will match any number of space or tab
see man 7 regex.

Originally Posted by Watael

hi,

Code:

[[:blank:]]*

will match any number of space or tab
see man 7 regex.

Thank you!
I also have another problem.
I have a file say called config and it has 4 fields: domain, type, item, and value. If the user enters the 3 first fields and they match, but the last field (value) is different from the one in the file, then the the value gets substitute by what was entered by the value entered by the user. I tried the following sript but it doesnt work.

#!/bin/bash
domain=$1
type=$2
item=$3
value=$4

a=$(awk -vdomain=$1 -vtype=$2 -vitem=$3 -vvalue=$4 '$1=="domain" && $2=="type" && $3=="item"' config)
b=$(echo $a | sed -r 's/\t/ /g' | cut -d" " -f4)
echo $a | awk '{sub("$b","$4"); print $0}'



config file is like this with tabs

misha hard nice 2
domain soft cake 5

I'd simply, and systematically, replace any lines having first three fields which match:

Code:

sed "s/$1\t$2\t$3\t/&$4" UrFile

even fourth field matches.

Minor detail:
sed command is missing a trailing / delimiter.
Would crash on GNU sed, probably most other sed versions.