CODEWITHSUNDEEP
bashawkgrepnumbersline
Caterina
Caterina

Reputation: 1007

How to get the line number of nth match?

Let's say I have the following file:

* cat
* dog
* cat
* fish
* fish
* cat
* turtle

Let's say I want to find the line number of the second match for cat, how can I do that?

Upvotes: 2

Views: 1214

Answers (2)

Erick Wong
Erick Wong

Reputation: 165

The awk solutions are more I/O efficient but I wanted to point out there is a pure shell solution also:

grep -n cat | head -2 | tail -n 1 | cut -d: -f1

Feel free to substitute any other regular expression for cat.

Upvotes: 1

karakfa
karakfa

Reputation: 67567

$ awk '/cat/{c++} c==2{print NR;exit}' file
3

count the cats, print the line number and exit after the required match value.

Upvotes: 6

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