Question

I have a 4-column CSV file:

01, cat, animal, it catches mice

• The file contains many characters from various languages in UTF-8.

How can I print only those lines containing exactly 2 characters in column 2 while also matching the pattern “/to ” anywhere on that line in column 4?

Answer 1

You can use awk :

$ cat /tmp/l
01, cat, animal, it catches mice
02, ok, aaa, e/tomos
03, bad, qux, vb/tomos

$ awk -F"," 'length($2) == 3 && $4 ~ /\057to/' /tmp/l
02, ok, aaa, e/atmos