Question

I am using the answer from How to restrict grep to search only the one column within a CSV file, but to output matching lines in their entirety? to search particular columns with awk, then output matching rows, e.g.:

awk -F@ "{if (\$2 ~ /$find_me/ ) { print \$0; } }" <input_file>

• How can I restrict the search to only match lines where the column matches $find_me entirely?
• How can I restrict the search to only output the first match found in the file?

Answer 1

You can try this:

awk -F@ -v pattern="$find_me" '$2 ~ "^" pattern "$"' input.txt

Or

awk -F@ -v pattern="^$find_me\$" '$2 ~ pattern' input.txt