using grep for find values larger/less than

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

Hi

I have been experimenting with grep to find values for a particular column that is greater than or less than certain #'s.

So my file looks like this:

name   -2  2
name1 -2  2
name2 -1  4
name3  3  3

So I want to find rows with values less than or equal to -2 and those greater than or equal to 3 (for column2 only)

Then the output would look like this:

name   -2  2
name1 -2  3
name3  3  3

I tried grep but I am very lost with it..

thanks

2

Horses for courses.

Why bust a gut with grep when other tools make light work of this sort of thing?

3

example awk oneliner:

awk ' $2<=-2 || $2>=3' myfile
4

hi thank you for the solution. It works..

what if I want to find something within a range lets say between -2 and 3. Obviously the directions of the arrows wont work.

thanks

5

Hi Phil, have you tried reversing the comparison operators? You can find out from Jim's solution what they look like.

6

Hey,

yeah I tried that

but that will give everything greater than -3 and everything less than 2.

5
4
3
2
1
0
-1
-2
-3
-4
-5

So lets I wanted the range of values to be -3 to 2 then the values being pulled out would be

2
1
0
-1
-2
-3

but instead if I only reversed teh arrows, I get everything greater than -3 and everything less than 2

---------- Post updated at 05:32 PM ---------- Previous update was at 05:14 PM ----------

awk ' $2>=-2 && $2<=3'

this seems to work i think...