It helps because you can build a list and print it out in one whack without worrying about where to add | chars... If I knew what your shell was I might be able to tell you even easier ways.

Anyway, you've got ' quote chars in your search string. I did ask if the literal quotes in

Code:

timestr="'("
timestr="${timestr})'"

were supposed to be there, because they have no special meaning to the shell when inside double-quotes. grep is hunting for literal 's.

The shell never evaluates what's inside variables for quote characters anyway, so adding them is doubly redundant.

---------- Post updated at 03:19 PM ---------- Previous update was at 03:15 PM ----------

I think you could replace those with

Code:

timestr=""
...
timestr="(${timestr})"

...again, pairing the brackets there to make it more obvious what you're actually doing.

---------- Post updated at 03:20 PM ---------- Previous update was at 03:19 PM ----------

You forgot the quotes, again. It's splitting on spaces, again.

Code:

grep "=${searchstr}" $logpath/$logfile | egrep "${timestr}"