I haven't tested this, but I believe what you wanted was something
more like the following:
egrep -e '^(.*;){2}201110' filename.csv
The curly brace operators are used to indicate how many times the
previous element should be matched. Putting curly braces around a
matching pattern is a no-op. You want to follow your pattern group
"(.*;)" with the number of matches "{2}".
-David
On Tue, Jan 24, 2012 at 9:05 AM, William Kreuter <bil...@drizzle.com> wrote:
> I want to select every line from a csv file which has the literal "201110"
> in the third field. Neither of the following do it.
>
> egrep -e '^{.*;}{2}201110' filename.csv
>
> egrep -E '^{.*;}{2}201110' filename.csv
>
> I haven't really figured out the use of curly braces. It seems that they're
> for both grouping (as in the left pair on these lines) and repetition (as in
> the right pair). My impression right now is that it's one, or both, of the
> curly-brace pairs which is doing something different than I want.
>
> I'm by no means wedded to egrep, if sed or awk or something can do it in a
> few keystrokes.
>
> Billy
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