searching letter patterns within words
 

Hi guys,

I have a long long list of nouns with frequency, so two columns:

alpha 45
beta 3
gamma 45

I need to find some particular patterns with the words, like for example "ph" in alpha, and copy the entire line (alpha 45).

When I want to look for the entire word, I generally use

awk '$1 == "alpha"{print $0}' infile.txt > outfile.txt

but how should I procede in this case?
Additionally, how to make the search case-insensitive?

I thank you very much for any possible suggestion!

Sincerely,

Udiubu

.. did you specifically want awk?

Cheers! I actually realized that grep could solve it already.
Well, I wanted to use awk, because in a second step I wanted to copy the second column only.

Anyways, thanks a lot.

Best,

Emiliano

Using awk you can set the IGNORECASE built-in variable to a non-zero value and try something like this (using a regular expression instead of string comparison):
In alternative you can try character lists with both the upper- and lower-case letters, but it may result cumbersome sometimes:
Hope this helps.

.. grabbing the second column :)

You do realise grep take as a filename as a param ie no 'cat' reqd ...

Yep ..