2013/6/13 Simon Mburu <sgatonye@gmail.com>

A simple cat and grep, should do it.
Something in the lines of

cat file1 | egrep ^2008\(06\|07\|08\|09) > file2

Without being picky.... isn't this some form of 'cat abuse'?

I think the cat command is superfluous; unless there's some not-so-obvious advantage it adds to that syntax.