Learning AWK Programming

Matching at the beginning of a string

The unquoted caret ^ matches the string at the beginning of line. The ^ is only the anchor if it is the first character in the regular expression. For example, we use the /^J/ regular expression to match all the lines that begin with J. It will print the employee information of those whose first name begins with the J character in the employee database:

$ awk '/^J/{ print }' emp.dat

The output on execution of the preceding code is as follows:

Jack    Singh   9857532312  [e-mail]      M   hr      2000Jane    Kaur    9837432312  [e-mail]      F   hr      1800Julie   Kapur   8826234556  [e-mail]     F   Ops     2500John    Kapur   9911556789  [e-mail]      M   hr      2200

We can also use the anchor, ^ (caret), with the string match operator (~)