Shell Programming and Scripting

I won't pretend. I am no bash, grep, awk or sed specialist but I have tried for a couple of days to extract something from a line in a file but have badly failed. There are just too may parenthesis, quotemarks, periods, etc. to trip me up, I think.

I need to extract mail24b.someplace.net and nothing more or less than that. I have to consider that mail24b.someplace.net is an unknown though. It could be mail.goober.org or incoming.outthere.com, etc. Whatever ... I just need to extract the info between that last set of quotes in the line.

Code:

user_pref("mail.server.server15.realhostname", "mail24b.someplace.net");

There are a lot ways you can approach this problem, one way is ( more ways to be followed by our team ):

Code:

sed 's/.*"\(.*\)"[^"]*$/\1/'
user_pref("mail.server.server15.realhostname", "mail24b.someplace.net");
mail24b.someplace.net

Explanation:

Code:

awk -F\" '{print $(NF-1)}'

Example:

Code:

$ echo 'user_pref("mail.server.server15.realhostname", "mail24b.someplace.net");' | awk -F\" '{print $(NF-1)}'
mail24b.someplace.net

Regards,
alister

Well, both of these work just fine. My own attempts with sed were not even close to:

Code:

sed 's/.*"\(.*\)"[^"]*$/\1/'

Obviously, I am going to have to study this a little bit, now that I have a correct example, to figure it all out.


As for the awk code, I was close with that. My last failed attempt was

Code:

awk -F/" '{print $NF}'

So, I guess I was atleast on the right trail. After my AM coffee I will check out my little guide and figure out what I was missing. I'm thinking I was maybe considering $NF as end of line. Then again, what I was wanting actually was not end of line. Whatever, I'll figure out what's what in a bit.

I appreciate the help from both of you. I get to learn something out of this. Thank you!

backslash in awk.

awk -F\" '{print $NF}'

Yeah, I caught that when comparing my attempts to the suggestions that were submitted. I retain well when learning by trial and error and this was definitely an error.

another approch

Code:

sed 's/.*, \"\([^"]*\).*/\1/'