Use unix grep command in AppleScript

This is tricky to do with grep since it involves some pretty heavy-duty regular expression formatting to filter specific fields in your input value.

However, there are alternatives that may be easier. For example, awk makes it pretty easy to match on specific fields in the input:

do shell script "awk '{if(match($2," & searchItem & ")) print $0}' " & filePath

This prints out all lines where the second field ($2) matches the searchItem string.

If your input data is comma-delimited you may need to add a '-F,' switch to tell it to use commas as the field delimiter (as opposed to whitespace).

Change this:

set searchItem to quote & "Joan" & quote

and the command will now replace as:

awk -F, '(index($4, "Joan") != 0)'

and match the records containing Joan in column 4.

You are welcome.

Show some sample columnar data from your filePath file. If this is a CSV-like formatted file what is the separator character?

The grep command does not take an integer, it takes text numeric search string. There are two different formats of your command depending on whether 1) you want to find 2018 in the filePath, or 2) in the actual filePath contents.

It sounds to me that you want something else, and haven't provided all the necessary information for the solution.

1) in the filePath name

set searchItem to "2018"

set foundRecs to do shell script "grep " & searchItem & " <<<" & filePath

2) in the filePath contents

set searchItem to "2018"

set foundRecs to do shell script "grep " & searchItem & space & filePath

And here is how you use Awk to print all lines containing 2018 in column 1 of a comma separated values file. The simplified CSV is:

This,That,2018

2018,That,2016

2016,This,2018

2018,2018,2018

and the code is:

set filePath to POSIX path of ((path to desktop as text) & "foo.csv") as text

set theCol to 1

set amatch to "2018"

-- columns in awk can be specified as $1, $2, ... $NF (last column). The field separator (-F) tells awk it is a comma.

-- UNIX command line: awk -F, '(index($1, "2018") != 0)' filePath

do shell script "awk -F, '(index($" & theCol & "," & amatch & ") != 0)' " & filePath

return

Result:

"2018,That,2016

2018,2018,2018"