Hi

Having a file as below

file.txt
using awk to sort, remove duplicate and display the latest log line
got error, not much clear with the syntax

any one can help me
Thanks with anticipation

If the code is not correct, then can you describe what it's supposed to do, in some detail?

Need to remove duplicate lines satisfies the below condition
if error, server, netowrk, dept and date are all the same then keep the latest line and remove old timed duplicate lines

Your code collects a unique line per time stamp ($NF is the last field on the line, the time stamp), not per the criteria you listed.

I don't know what the FS=" *" part is supposed to do, the regular whitespace separation that awk uses by default should work, and the FS looks like it's more or less the same thing anyway (not sure if you have tabs in there or not).

The keys you want to use are $1 (error), $2 (server), $3 (network), $4 (dept), and $5 (date). You probably want to do the arithmetic normalization on the time field, not on the date.

I moved the END to the end (sic) purely for readability reasons; awk doesn't care much where in the script you put it.

So t contains the time stamp from $7 with the colons removed, and k is the combination of the fields you want to compare time stamps for (error, server, network, dept, date). If t is bigger than the old t you have for this k in m[k] (or it doesn't exist, meaning it's effectively zero), replace it, and remember the whole line in r[k]. Finally print all the lines in r.

Oh, the single number one after the closing brace is significant, too; it causes the header lines to be printed. If you don't want to print them, take it out. (It's a shorthand; it says "for any remaining line -- for which 1 is true, which by definition it is; this thus means all remaining lines, excluding any which were already handled earlier in the script -- do the default action, which is to print the line.")