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  • Instead of fooling around alot with variables, cut, echo and sed, you could replace all by a simple sed -E "s/.*,(.*),(.*)/'\1.*,\2'/", but actually you don't want the single quotes to be part of the search pattern, so it's -E "s/.*,(.*),(.*)/\1.*,\2/". Escape the pattern variable with double quotes, like @Romeo indicated in his answer. Commented Apr 26, 2017 at 7:39
  • Thanks, I replaced the variables with the sed command, but it generates a space at the beginning of the line which causes the grep to fail. Commented Apr 26, 2017 at 8:23
  • What did you try? I do for pattern in "$(sed -E "s/.*,(.*),(.*)/\1.*,\2/" input.csv)"; do grep "$pattern" modded_file.csv.dat; done to iterate through your input file. You can also do the whole thing in one pass, but this requires deeper sed or awk experience Commented Apr 26, 2017 at 8:40
  • Turns out that since the input file was windows based, it had carriage return for each line which I had to remove. Your solution worked perfect after this. Thanks! Commented Apr 26, 2017 at 11:50
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    @ShashankKR That proves once more that it is always a bad idea to process CSV files (which only in a small subset of cases are line based) with line oriented tools. You should use Perl/Python/Ruby, that have libraries to deal with real CSV files. Commented Apr 26, 2017 at 15:53