Hi all,
I have a problem about developing shell
script to extract words with regular expression.
For example, I have one text file that contain sth below....

This is a pen.I have a car.My name is John
I have no pencil but I can find for you.
aaaaaa bbb pkkkkkkkdcils lss

I want my word in this text file that begin with
"p" and end with "cil" (p*cil)
in this text file you can find
pencil in line 2 and
pkkkkkkkdcil in line 3

that i can do with grep....
but there is a problem that I want only word
i want pencil and pkkkkkkkdcil only.

Thanks ,
Terry

Since grep outputs entire lines that contain the target expression, and you want individual words, we can first convert the file to one word per line:

fmt -1 myfile | grep ^p.*encil$

The above will print words that begin with p and end with cil. The last line of your test file contains the word pkkkkkkkdcils which would not qualify since it ends with cils and not cil.