Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi, I need to write a script that will read each line of a CSV file, look for values greater than x seconds and email an alert.

For the first part, I have one CSV per day, each line in the CSV has comma separated values. There are a total of 8 fields per line separated by commas. 6th and 7th fields are dates and the 8th field is the difference between the dates.
e.g. 1, hello, world, x, 2012-05-16T09:56:24Z, 2012-05-16T09:56:25.373Z, 1.373 secs

I need to be able to pick the last field i.e. the time difference and if it is greater than a certain value say 1 minute email an alert. An idea would be to count the commas and pick the values after the 7th but you guys might have better ideas.

For the second part; sending an email, I can use MUTT so that is not a problem.

Purpose of the exercise is to measure latency.

Any tips/pointers/links that I can reference will be appreciated.

Thanks.

Using ksh or bash, something like this, provided you want to alarm if any line in the file exceeds the threshold.

Code:

if ! awk -F , -v threshold=60.0 '$7+0 > threshold { exit( 1 ) }' <input-file
then
    echo "alert!"
fi

Code:

awk -vSECS=60 '$(NF-1)+0 > SECS { exit 3}' file.csv
[ $? -eq 3]  && mutt ....

Thanks for the quick responses. I will try both examples out see which one fits best