unix - using grep to print specific lines in another file

Question

I want to use grep command to print only those lines that contains a specific string in another file. My file is in xsls format and looks like:

I only want to extract those lines that contain 5'UTR in Annotation column.

The command I use is:

grep 'UTR$' Lee2012.xslx > utr.txt

However, I end up getting an empty file. I'll appreciate if someone can explain what I am doing wrong. Insights will be appreciated. Thank you!

question from:https://stackoverflow.com/questions/65920408/using-grep-to-print-specific-lines-in-another-file

Answer 1

Your sixth column ends with UTR, not the whole line, that is why you get no results.

To get all lines where the sixth column ends with UTR, you can use

awk '$6 ~ /UTR$/' Lee2012.xslx > utr.txt

This assumes your column (field) separators are whitespace.