Shell Programming and Scripting

Originally Posted by mirni

OK, well, that is progress.
Notice these two lines?

Code:

       
      split($N, A, "="); 
      D[A[1]]=A[2];

This splits the line (stored in $N) on '=' and stores it in array A.
The second line stores the second field only A[2].
Since nobody mentioned before that the lines could have multiple equal signs, it was assumed that lines were in the form

Code:

label=value

where the value would not contain the '=' (a very resonable assumption).

So, you need to append the rest of the fields, like e.g.:

Code:

awk 'BEGIN {
  while((getline < "server.list")>0)
     S[$0]

  FS="\n"; RS="}\n"
}

/service_description=MEMORY_CHECK/ {

  for(X in D) delete D[X];

  for(N=2; N<=NF; N++)
  {
       split($N, A, "=");
       D[A[1]] = A[2]
       i = 3;
       while (i in A) 
          D[A[1]] = D[A[1]] "=" A[i++];
  }

  if (D["host_name"] in S) 
       printf("%20s -- %50s\n", D["host_name"], D["plugin_output"])

}' $1

Now did you read the code and try to think how it works? The order is not random, at all. It processes one chunk at a time, and looks if the particular chunk's hostname is in the server list.
If you insist to process them in a fixed order, by-server, you would have to do what you did before, scan the log once for each server.
So I suggest you take the order that is given by the log file, and sort the results to get them in the order you want.