GNU awk supports \< and \> for start and end of word anchors, which works for GNU grep/sed as well GNU awk also supports \y which is same as \b as well as \B f

GNU awk supports \< and \> for start and end of word anchors, which works for GNU grep/sed as well GNU awk also supports \y which is same as \b as well as \B for opposite (same as GNU grep/sed) Intererstingly, there's a difference between the three types of word anchors: $ # \b matches both start and end of word boundaries $ # 1st and 3rd line have space as second character $ echo 'I have 12, he has 2!' | grep -o '\b..\b' I 12 , he 2 $ # \< and \> strictly match only start and end word boundaries respectively $ echo 'I have 12, he has 2!' | grep -o '\<..\>' 12 he $ # -w ensures there are no word characters around the matching text $ # same as: grep -oP '(?<!\w)..(?!\w)' $ echo 'I have 12, he has 2!' | grep -ow '..' 12 he 2!