Anchor characters are used to match the beginning or the end of a line. There are two anchor characters: the caret (^) and the dollar sign ($).
The caret character is used to match the beginning of a line:
$ echo "Welcome to shell scripting" | awk '/^Welcome/{print $0}'$ echo "SHELL scripting" | awk '/^Welcome/{print $0}'$ echo "Welcome to shell scripting" | sed -n '/^Welcome/p'
So, the caret character is used to check whether the specified text is at the beginning of the line.
If you want to search for the caret as a character, you should escape it with a backslash if you use AWK.
However, if you use sed, you don't need ...