Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi

I am trying to figure out the best way to search a long log file and print out certain information.

For example if I had a line in a log file delimited by ampersand

first_name=mike&last_name=smith&zip_code=55555&phone=555-5555&state=ma&city=boston

and I only wanted to search for and print out first_name and state like so

first_name=mike
state=ma

Any suggestions would be helpful I am very new to this. I figure awk or sed would be a useful tool here.

Hi,

Try this:

Code:

$ awk -F"&" '{ printf "%s\n%s\n", $1, $5; }' infile
first_name=mike
state=ma

Regards,
Birei

Hi

Thank you for your reply this is basically what I was looking for. However, what if I did not know what order each parameter was in or not all of them show up in each line.

So basically to guarantee to return say first_name and state each time (or nothing if they are not present)

Thanks

I am not very clear about the sed matching.

It can be easily done by matching the line.

It can be easily done using Perl:

$ddd="first_name=mike&last_name=smith&zip_code=55555&phone=555-5555&state=ma&city=boston";
$ddd =~ m/firstname=(\w*).*state=(\w*)/;
print $1; prints the firstname matched
print $2;prints the state name matched

In sed also it can be matched and done in the similar way But not very clear