Using grep to search and display specific columns

[lostinnewbieland]

Hi everyone,

This is my first posting to the forum. I hope you can help me with this.

I have a file called "donors.dat" that I am trying to display from the last 5 columns (which is a zip code) only the ones that have a 2,3,4,5, and 7. Here is the first line:

01 e smith edward 11 012 33308

I tried this, but it didn't work:

grep '[2-57]$....' donors.dat

What am I doing wrong?

[alf55]

Since you have the "$" in the regular expression, the last digit on the line must be in the set [ 2,3,4,5,7 ] and the .... would mean the next line has at least 4 characters.

Have you tried looking for a much more complex regular expression? Such as:

'.* .* .* .* .* .* .*[2-57].*$'