How to use word boundaries in awk without using match() function?

Question

I want to add word boundaries to this awk command:

awk \'{$0=tolower($0)};/wordA/&&/wordB/ { print FILENAME \":\" $0; }\' myfile.txt

Answer 1

You want to use gawk instead of awk:

gawk '{$0=tolower($0)};/\ywordA\y/&&/\ywordB\y/ { print FILENAME ":" $0; }' myfile.txt

will do what you want, if your system has gawk (e.g. on Mac OS X). \y is a GNU extension to awk.