Hi,

When I grep a text file for a pattern, it is printing all the occurences of that pattern to the console separated by some delimiter.

But I want to split all the occurences into separate strings using 'cut', I tried to use the following:

% grep '^steve' textfile | cut -f1 -d'\n'

If I use the above command it says "invalid delimiter". I don't know what delimiter grep inserts after printing out every occurrence of steve.

I want to do this because, if I say:
% grep '^steve' textfile
it is returning all the names such as:
steve
steven
stevenson
stevens

etc.. But I want only steve.

How should I do this?

Any help is very much appreciated.

Thanks a lot in advance,
sbk

Try grep -w

Marco

Hi Marco,

Thanks for the reply. It worked. But I also tried this:

/usr/xpg4/bin/grep -x 'steve' filename

which also worked for me.

regards,
sbk