Re: what regular expression do I need?

[davido]

A simple regex works fine, but transliteration is often more efficient. Here's an approach with tr///. This snippet iterates over each line of each file supplied at the command prompt, and prints the filename and line number, along with a highlighted version of the line's data showing where the problems are:

while( <> ) {
  chomp;
  if( tr/IMO//c ) {
    s/([^IMO]+)/[-->$1<--]/g;
    print "File: $ARGV, Line $.: $_\n";
  }
}

This would be invoked as:

$ ./nonimo.pl filename1.txt filename2.txt

It could be expressed as a one-liner, in fact, like this:

perl -lnE 'if(tr/IMO//c){s/([^IMO]+)/[-->$1<--]/g; say "$ARGV-$.: $_"}
+' file1.txt file2.txt fileXX.txt

The output is a little more terse, but it does the same thing. In either case, if your objective is just to print the bad lines, you can easily simplify the print statement.

[tbone654]

How about...

cat file1 | perl -e 'while(<>){ next if !/IMO/; print $_;}'

If the lines can only begin with IMO then:

cat file1 | perl -e 'while(<>){ next if !/\bIMO/; print $_;}'

If case is not important then:

cat file1 | perl -e 'while(<>){ next if !/\bIMO/i; print $_;}'

If you have multiple words to search for, then create another file named file2 and enter the search words:

vi file2
apple
orange
banana

grep -f file2 file1

From the unix command-line... file2 is the list of words to search for from lines in file1... Note: you may have to run "dos2unix file2" to remove LF/CR or use chomp somehow...