Search string using grep

Question

In my file_*.txt there are two type of words one containing LC1 only and another containing LC1_R.

I would like to grep lines that contain only LC1 not LC1_R. How can I do it?

I tried:

grep "LC1" file_*.txt

then I am getting both lines that contains LC1 as well as those lines which contains LC1_R also.

Answer 1

You can use \b to match the word boundary:

grep '\bLC1\b' file.txt 

Answer 2

Awk alternative here. You didn't give much idea about contents of your file,so I'll here's an answer that operates on fields (words) in general

awk '{for(i=1;i<NF;i++) {if ($i=="LC1"){print $0}}}'