Bash: grep pattern from command output

Question

I\'m really new with bash, but it\'s one of the subjects on school. One of the exercises was:

Give the line number of the file \"/etc/passwd\" where the informat

Answer 1

You can do this with a single awk invocation:

awk -v me=$(whoami) -F: '$1==me{print NR}' /etc/passwd

In more detail:

• the -v creates an awk variable called me and populates it with your user name.
• the -F sets the field separator to : as befits the password file.
• the $1==me only selects lines where the first field matches your user name.
• the print outputs the record number (line).