Yeah, I was thinking of the FWD, but looking at complete log files I see that not every entry is forwarded to someone else. Unfortunately, the only constant between entries is that the next entry starts with the 4 digit time and position (which for this facility is always TMU). The only other constant is the keyword that starts the entry, such as WX: or METERING:. Even to colon isn't constant after the keyword.

I've asked the development team that works on the program to add keyword search to the reports we can generate from the command line, but even if they do it, it'll take over a year to get it in place. The government moves extremely slow when tinkering with stuff they consider "operational" to the National Airspace System, even when it doesn't have any effect on controlling aircraft!

Thanks again for the suggestions. I'll keep tinkering, but scripting isn't my strong point. I can program in Visual Basic, but that won't work on Linux

Hadn't given it too much thought. Since each line in the entry is a fixed length (including spaces, it looks like it's 80) maybe I could save it into a variable, then trim so many characters from the end. With sed I don't know how to trim the end of each individual return, and then copy the variable into the new file and continue the sed. Wish I understood this better!

If you can play with the input file a little, I can do this in ksh.


usage:

thisscript.sh 15.txt

Notes: I'm commenting here to keep the clutter in the code down.

Script takes your input file as parameter '1' and asigns that to FILE1.
FILE2 is a temp file we'll use for output.

cat FILE1 to 'tr' to change all newlines to spaces and store the result in FILE2

'print' then appends a newline to the end of FILE2. This is necessary or 'sed' will ignore the input of FILE2 as it must see a newline.

cat FILE2 into two distinct sed process. The first inserts a new line before the specified pattern of ' #### TMU' (I use # instead of the actual numerical pattern for brevity here). Note there is a space before the first number.

In the first sed process note that there is a REQUIRED newline after the '/\' so that the rest of the command resumes on the next line with "\1/g' "

Now you have records that are separated by a newline w/o any newlines in the records themselves as there was before.

So the second sed process can now identify each record you want printed with only 1 address, and print the full record, w/o printing the record(s) you don't want.

The [WM][EX] will, unfortunately find 'MX' and 'WE' as well as 'WX' and 'ME', so you may have to play with this depending upon your actual data.

why exactly do you need to 'cat' into 'tr' and 'sed'?

Thanks for challenging that. As you already know (since I've seen you issue this challenge before ;-) ), I don't have to cat into either command, when I can use redirect for 'tr' and sed will work on a specified file. Saves a couple of processes.

Also, thanks for fixing my code tags before. I was trying to do that, and then saw it was already done.

So the 'tr' line can be changed to:

and the sed line can be changed to:

I don't want anyone to think I'm ignoring posts, but I got pulled into an all-day meeting and it may last through tomorrow. Next week I'm traveling (Hawaii, yeah!) so won't be able to test anything on a Linux box. I will still try things on my Windows laptop, but as I've already found, what works here may not work there.

I really appreciate all the help, and I'm sure we'll come up with a solution. I'm excited to try using awk instead of sed, and I have it on my laptop as well. Please keep the suggestions coming!