Shell Programming and Scripting

I have a log file that display the serial output coming from different places. Sometime the string in search gets clobbered with the other strings and consequently change form. For example:

serial ouput:
--------------

hello world!
done with network
configuring asic registers
comJan 1 00:00:11 network: checksum passed
plete

---------------

In this case I want to check for "complete" string but since it is clobbered with the network stuff, i cant verify its existence. Is there a way I can use some sort of string matching to detect such strings?

If your file is complete.txt

Code:

final=`tail -1 complete.txt`

sets the variable final to plete
(assuming your file ends at the complete message??)

Code:

cat complete.txt | grep -B 1 $final | head -1

gives the preceeding line (although lots of other ways)

now you are left with how to figure out if complete is spelled on those two.

thought about using

Code:

tr -cd [complet]

to get rid of everything but those characters

but am now thinking to count the number of characters on last line (final variable) and subtract from the 8 in complete. and then check to see if that number of characters is how the previous line begins.

"Complete" can be anywhere in the file not necessarily at the end of the file... This approach might work but not sure how to implement it: accepting arbitrarily many characters between each char in the pattern c*o*m*p*l*e*t*e