Selecting rows based on values in columns

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

Hi
My pipe delimited .txt file contains rows with 10 columns.
Can anyone advise how I output to file only those rows with the letters �ci'
as the first 2 characters in the 3rd column ?
Many thanks

2 
 
awk -F\| '{if(substr($3,0,2)=="ci") print}' inputFile
3 
awk -F"|" '{if($3=="ci.*")print $0}' inputfile
4 
$ sed "/^[^|]*|[^|]*|ci/!d" file1

$ awk -F\| '$3 ~ /^ci/' file1
5

Many thanks for the prompt responses.
I will use scottn's sed solution, as I understand sed better than awk.
Thanks again everyone !