Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi All,

I've been trying solve this with a simple command but not having much luck. I have a file like this:

Code:

Line 1: random_description 123/alert/high random_description2 356/alert/slow
Line 2: random_description3 654/alert/medium
Line 3: random_description4 234/alert/critical

I'm trying to get the value infront of '/alert', so in this this case the output would be:

Code:

123
356
654
234

I had some joy with awk but it was only grabing the first value on the line and not the others. I guess basically I want to say:

match '/alert' and output everything before untill you reach a space character?

Any pointers?

Code:

 perl -nle '$,="\n";print /\w+(?=\/alert)/g' file

Another one (from someone who doesn't know perl )

Code:

$ xargs -n1 < file | sed -n "s/\/alert.*//p"
123
356
654
234

ah xargs! Didnt know about that ...

so if I had I would have done:

Code:

xargs -n1 < file.txt | grep "/alert" | cut -d "/" -f1

That seems to work ...

I really need to get my head around awk/sed, any recommended sites with guides for total n00bs?

Why use one pipe, when you can use two

The best website I could recommend is the one starting with G!

hehe, I was expecting that to be the answer to my first question!

Another one with sed:

Code:

sed -n '/alert/ s#.* \(.*\)/alert.*#\1#p' file