I want to select the word only if starts with 'LN'. So I used awk '/LN/ {print $1}' but this returns other words too with 'LN' anywhere except the first two char like 'NY00xxLN' which I don't want. How to tell it to match only first 2 char in the word?? dips

Here is a basic loop to look at each word in the line.  I don't think you are interested in locating multiple qualifying words on the same line, so upon encountering the first qualifying word, I break out of the for-loop. I used the "like" operator and beginning-of-expression anchoring, but you could also use if (substr($w,1,2)=="LN") awk '{ for (w=1;w<=NF;w++)    if ($w~"^LN")       {print "whatever ..."        break} }' infile

Thanks... That didn't work. I tried with nawk also but it says Syntax error....But i tried this $nawk -F"," '$2~/^LN/{print $2}' infile.txt It works... I only want "the searching" to be done in the 2nd field of the file dips