Shell Programming and Scripting

I have a range of log files from rsync on an Ubuntu 10.04 server. At the bottom of these files, I have "--stats" -- a rsync switch -- which produces interesting information/statistics.

Steps the script will take:
I'm a novice to this sort of work. I don't know what the best tools to use would be. Perhaps I could tail the information to the text file?, and then use a tool to format the text nicely. I don't know if grep would suffice to grab those bottom 12 lines or so, or if I should dive into the sed/awk world? Maybe even a shell/perl/python script? If you could point me into a good direction with suggestions, that'd be great

Post the output of the last 12 lines of a logfile (tail -12 logfile) and the desired formatted output.


For sending a mail could have a you read of:

How do I send email? - The UNIX and Linux Forums

and for cron jobs:

https://www.unix.com/answers-frequent...n-crontab.html

If I wanted the last 12 lines, that would suffice. There are a lot of log files that differ, however. So I would need to get lines via keywords; line numbers wouldn't be as effective.


Rsync and the respective logging is what I have already set up as a cron job. I'm modifying arbitrary text into a file, formatting that text, then piping that file into mailx with a subject. The latter I am fine with -- I'm asking for advice on how to certain gather text from files that are timestamped in the format yyyymmdd, and then format that text into something easier to read. Sorry if I was unclear!

To format the lines you could use awk, something like:

Code:

awk '
$0 ~ d { 
  # Format the line here
  # ....
  # and print the line:
  print
}' d="20110108" logfile