Grepping word based on white space.....

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

Hi,

I am having a text file with following contents:

[space][space][space]word
[space][space][space][space][space]word

I want to grep the first line i.e. word that is being preceded with three space characters.

So i tried

sed -n '/ {3}/p' filename
grep " {3}" filename

But is not returning any result. If i don't use {}, then it returns both the patterns.

2 
 
$ awk ' /^   [A-Za-z0-9]/ ' filename
   ABC
   FGH
3

Yes that will return both the lines, i want only that pattern which is having only three white spaces in front of it.

4 
grep "^   [^ ]" file
5

my test file has the below lines.

 
bash-3.00$ cat test
   ABC
     CDE
   FGH


 
$ awk ' /^   [A-Za-z0-9]/ ' test     
   ABC
   FGH

it returns only the 3 space lines. Make sure you are giving three space in between the /^ [A

7

You could try as above highlighted..