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Date:      Mon, 17 Apr 2017 12:44:49 -0400
From:      Jim Trigg <jtrigg@huiekin.org>
To:        freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: awk help
Message-ID:  <2677c41da02c17d82fd8104382433db5@huiekin.org>
In-Reply-To: <c95e03d2-986d-3c3c-198a-a28ab862dc70@gmail.com>
References:  <58F25A01.1060208@gmail.com> <7951DF71-5CD3-4B53-9CB4-13CAA8945983@huiekin.org> <58F4CD14.7090008@gmail.com> <c95e03d2-986d-3c3c-198a-a28ab862dc70@gmail.com>

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On 2017-04-17 12:08, Andreas Perstinger wrote:
> On 2017-04-17 16:11, Ernie Luzar wrote:
>> When I first tested /^Address/ and /^ Hits/ produced no output. I
>> changed them to /Address/ and /Hits/ and this produced output. I
>> could not find any reference to the ^ sign, so I would like to know 
>> what is it suppose to do?
> 
> "^" inside a regular expression is an anchor and matches the beginning
> of the line. (See "man re_format" or e.g.
> http://www.regular-expressions.info/anchors.html ). In the example
> you've posted, the lines containing "Address" and "Hits" are indented
> which means there are spaces/tabs between the beginning of the line and
> these words. Thus the patterns don't match.

And I misread the original message and got the wrong number of indenting 
spaces in my suggested patterns.

Just to be pedantic, in awk the anchor is the beginning of the *record*, 
not the *line*.

-- 
Jim Trigg



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