Find lines starting with one specific character and ending with another one
Just say this:
grep '^a.*e$' fileThis means: look for those lines starting (^) with a, then 0 or more characters and finally and e at the end of the line ($).
Test
$ cat ahelloand thisfinishes with efoo$ grep '^a.*e$' aand thisfinishes with e
Simple answer : use grep.
grep -E "^a.*e$" filenamethe ^ indicates the beggining of the linethe $ marks the end of the linethe .* means any character (the .) repeated from zero to any number of times (the *).Many topics have already answered this questions, like this one.If you want to know more of searching, you could look more in depth into REGEX.