I have a huge ASCII file which contains thousands of lines and I want to
extract lines that contains a numeric character (0 to 9) at column position
5 and 75.

Is there a simple command to do this?

Thanks in advanced for any help.
Best regards,
Bill

perl -ne'print if substr($_,4,1)=~/\d/ and substr($_,74,1)=~/\d/' yourfile

John
--
use Perl;
program
fulfillment

is this simple enough for you?

awk 'BEGIN {FS=""} $5 ~ /[0-9]/ && $75 ~/[0-9]/ { print $0 }' input.file

Eric

awk 'substr($0, 5, 1) substr($0, 75, 1) ~ /[0-9][0-9]/' < file

--
Stphane                      ["Stephane.Chazelas" at "free.fr"]

Maybe a little gawk specific.

POSIX says:

      1. If FS is a null string, the behavior is unspecified.

--
Stphane                      ["Stephane.Chazelas" at "free.fr"]

Many thanks for the quick responses. Both solutions help to fix my problem.

Thanks again.
Best regards,
Bill
news:bqjusu$2482ap$1@ID-174003.news.uni-berlin.de...

You were given Awk solution.  Now for other ways...

1.  sed -n '/^.\{4\}[0-9].\{69\}[0-9]/p'

2.  awk -v FIELDWIDTHS='4 1 69 1' '$2~/[0-9]/ && $4~/[0-9]/ {print}'

3.  while read line; do
        a=`echo "$line" | cut -c 5,75`
        case "$a" in
            [0-9][0-9]) echo "$line";;
        esac
    done

4.  while read line; do
        a=${line:4:1}
        b=${line:74:1}
        case "$a$b" in
            ...
        esac
    done

--
William Park, Open Geometry Consulting, <opengeome...@yahoo.ca>
Linux solution for data management and processing.

grep '^....[0-9].....................................................................[0-9]'