grep only for certain word on line

Question

Need to grep only the word between the 2nd and 3rd to last /

This is shown in the extract below, to note that the location on the filename is not always the same counting from the front. Any ideas would be helpful.

/home/user/Drive-backup/2010 Backup/2010 Account/Jan/usernameneedtogrep/user.dir/4.txt

Do you want a script or a command in an editor (which one?) ? — Toto, Jun 16 '11 at 15:46
@M42 from the above line I just need the username which is located between to the second and third to last / to be outputted to a file — Grimlockz, Jun 16 '11 at 15:56

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Jun 16 '11 at 15:58

1

Here is a Perl script that does the job:

my $str = q!/home/user/Drive-backup/2010 Backup/2010 Account/Jan/usernameneedtogrep/user.dir/4.txt!;
my $res = (split('/',$str))[-3];
print $res;

output:

usernameneedtogrep

answered Jun 16 '11 at 15:58

Toto

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score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Jun 16 '11 at 15:58

0

I'd use awk:

awk -F/ '{print $(NF-2)}'

splits on /
NF is the index of the last column, $NF the last column itself and $(NF-2) the 3rd-to-last column.

You might of course first need to filter out lines in your input that are not paths (e.g. using grep and then piping to awk)

answered Jun 16 '11 at 15:58

mhyfritz

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If I wanted to get the 3rd column as well would that be another AWK command next to it or before it – Grimlockz Jun 16 '11 at 17:03
This would print the 3rd and the 3rd-to-last column: `awk -F/ '{print $3, $(NF-2)}'`. Is that what you need? – mhyfritz Jun 16 '11 at 17:09

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Jun 16 '11 at 16:12

0

a regular expression something like this should do the trick:

/.\/(.+?)\/.*?\/.*$/

(note I'm using lazy searches (+? and *?) so that it doesn't includes slashes where we don't want it to)

answered Jun 16 '11 at 16:12

Spudley

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grep only for certain word on line

3 Answers3