[SATLUG] using grep

[Brad Knowles]

On 9/20/07, twistedpickles wrote:

>  what I have tried and hasn't worked is:
>  $grep -c 15:[0-59]:[0-59] tmpIEEE-17.txt
>  above displays 0
>  $grep -c [15:00:00-15:59:59] tmpIEEE-17.txt
>  above counts every line in the log

Your shell is almost certainly interpreting the brackets for you. 
Try putting your arguments to grep into single quotes.

For my part, if this is the format in the log file:

[2007-09-20 15:13:23] User  IEEE  permitted in class Public

I'd be inclined to do something like this:

	$ awk '{ print $2 }' < tmpIEEE-17.txt | sed 's/:.*$//g' | uniq -c

What this does is use the program "awk" to pull out the second 
whitespace-delimited argument from each line (the stuff like 
"15:13:23]"), then use "sed" to strip off everything after the first 
colon.  This should give you a long list of hours.  Then pipe that to 
"uniq -c" to get a count of how many times each hour shows up in the 
output.

-- 
Brad Knowles <brad at shub-internet.org>
LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu>