Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi,

I have hundreds of files "*.out" located in one folder,
and I want to:
1. Identify the good files containing "Normal termination" (grep "Normal termination" *.out )
2. Compress the good files into a tar.gz file (tar cvfz good.tar.gz *.goog.out )

Is there a way I can automate this process using a shell script?

Thanks!
Todd

Code:

grep -F "Normal termination" *.out | cut -d':' -f1 | sort | uniq

will provide a list of files that meet that condition

maybe something like

Code:

grep -l "Normal termination" /your_folder/*.out 2>/dev/null | xargs tar cvfz your_archive.tar

or

Code:

cd /your_folder/ && grep -l "Normal termination" ./*.out 2>/dev/null | xargs tar cvfz your_archive.tar

Elaborating on ctsgnb you could compress the tar file in the same command:-

Code:

grep -l "Normal termination" /your_folder/*.out 2>/dev/null |tar cvf - |compress> your_archive.tar.Z

This should work if the z flag is not supported by your operating system.

If there are too many files for the grep to cope with (i.e. if *.out expands to build a command line of more than the maximum command length for your operating system) you could convert to find however this would decend any subdirectories and follow symbolic links. Another problem you may hit would be that the list of files generated could be longer that would fit one command for the tar part. Using xargs may cause you to backup over the same file several times. You would end up with a file of only the last groups written to the archive.

If you have AIX, you can capture the file names in another file then use that with the -L flag, but I'm not sure which other operating systems support this.

The command found become two lines:-

Code:

find . -type f -name "*.out" -exec grep -l "Normal Termination" {} /dev/null \; >/tmp/filelist 2>/dev/null
tar -cvf - -L /tmp/filelist|compress>your_archive.tar.Z

I hope that this helps


Robin
Liverpool/Blackburn
UK

Thanks so much!
Combining you three's solutions, it works perfectly!
Have a good day!