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I have a text file that looks like this:

landlord: John Smith has: house: 0 flat: 5 available: 1 cheap: 0 quality: 1 landlord: Will Hall has: house: 3 flat: 4 available: 1 cheap: 1 quality: 0 landlord: Marry Moe has: house: 0 flat: 2 available: 1 cheap: 1 quality: 0

All I am interested in is landlord and available lines. How to grep the available: 1 line by landlord ? I mean cat filename | grep -i 'landlord: John Smith' and then check if available is 1 or 0 ?

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  • grep -i 'landloard: John Smith' - you meant landlord? Commented Jan 17, 2021 at 20:53
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    If you have any influence over the format here, I think it might be worth changing it from what seems to be "almost yaml" to actually being proper yaml, in which case you would have proper tooling readily available. Pretending that this is plain text may work to some extent, but it seems like the robust solution would be to actually treat it as the structured data that it is. Commented Jan 17, 2021 at 20:56

2 Answers 2

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Here is one way to do it:

egrep "(landlord|available)" filename | grep -A1 "John Smith"

UPD to check availability:

egrep "(landlord|available)" filename | grep -A1 "John Smith" | grep -c "available: 1"
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  • Nice one, but grep will exit with 0 status (success) as it is searching for John Smith and not the available: 1. It should check if John Smith is available: 1 if no - exit with status 1. Commented Jan 17, 2021 at 21:04
  • throw another grep at it and see if available: 1 is in there, updated the answer Commented Jan 17, 2021 at 21:19
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You can use this command for the same:

grep -A 4 -i 'John Smith' test.txt | grep -i available

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