Attn: AWK GURUS (Generic Search)

[Jonathan I. Kamens]

  It seems to me that if your database contains simply lines with certain
characters in each column, and you want to search for lines matching a
specified pattern of characters, the simplest thing to use is grep.

  You gave an example of finding "only the records with (a) in col1, (nop) in
col19-21, (v) in col29 and (y) in col34."  How about:

    grep "^a.................   .......v....y" database-filename

Read the man page for grep if you don't understand the periods in the regular
expression above.

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