Have a look at perlrun and the -F switch, it's similar to awk, except it splits into the array @F:

perl -F: -lane 'print $F[0] if /^[A-Z]/' infile

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Now you could pipe that through sort, or with some trickery you can have Perl do that for you too (see the "Eskimo greeting" in perlsecret):

perl -F: -lane 'push @x, $F[0] if /^[A-Z]/}{print for sort @x' infile

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This should produce the same output as your first grep | awk | sort command.

In reply to Re: Parse a text file with oneliner by haukex
in thread Parse a text file with oneliner by RenMcCourtey

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