awk -F: '$2 == "B" && $8 == "Y"' filename

which under Win/Dos get well confused and effectively useless

I thought I would share a thought that came to me at 3am this
morning of how to avoid this by using the ~

i.e.
    awk -F: '$2 ~ \B\ && $8 ~ \Y\' filename

Of course this is not perfect because ~ means contains and == "..." means
equals, but for my case this was sufficient

Hope it helps others too ;-)

Mark
--
Mark Katz
ISPC, London - Innovation in data-delivery tools
Tel: (44) 208-455 4665, Fax (44) 208-458 9554
** See our website at http://www.*-*-*.com/ **

BTW, I note that you use T-AWK (under DOS [aka, Windows]).  As it turns out,
there are two possibles provided for you by Thompson:
        1) You could use their Toolkit shell, which behaves a lot like Unix
           csh (for better or worse...).  It does get you around most of the
           quoting problems.
        2) They also have a gadget where you can put stuff in environment
           variables and then use them on the command line.  T-AWK parses
           these like Unix environment vars - even if the shell is ordinary
           COMMAND.COM.  As a test, I just did:

           C:\tmp> set foo="bar"
           C:\tmp> awkw "BEGIN {print $foo}"
           bar
           C:\tmp>

           (in a DOS window under Win98).
           Note the use of double quotes (not single!) in the awk command
           line so that, Unix style, the env var *does* get expanded.

    awk -F: '$2 ~ /^B$/ && $8 ~ /^Y$/' filename

which would be equivalent to the equals thing.

I assume you had a typo and used backslashes by accident, or is
that a DOS/Windows "feature."  :-)

Chuck Demas
Needham, Mass.
[posted and emailed]

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