Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi gurus

I am running a grep statement like this

(ls -ltr eCustomerCME* | grep ^- | tail -1 | awk ' { print $6,$7,$8 } ')

its returning an error as follows

"ksh: /bin/ls: arg list too long"

Does anybody know why this error occurs. this seems to work fine in other boxes except this particular box.

I have another question as well. I have variable that has a timestamp value. I want to check if the variable has any alphabets. I will use that to exut from my code. can you guys suggest how to do that.

Thanks in advance.

Take a look at the xargs manpage. I'm not 100% sure the following will work but......

ls -ltr eCustomerCME* -print0 | xargs -0 grep ^- | tail -1 | awk ' { print $6,$7,$8 } '

Kent

The error is because the * globs (finds) too many files - more than the number or size of arguments allowed.

Sorry I didn't have time to test yesterday. This should work, but a more elegant solution is probably out there.

find . -name "eCustomerCME*" -print0 | xargs -0 ls -lt | grep ^- | tail -1 | awk ' { print $6,$7,$8 } '

thanks for the reply guys, jberede thanks a lot for the informattion, it worked.

is there a way to check NAN in shell scripts? thanks in advance

Hi Jim

how do I correct this error. pls help me out with this

guys.. i use this command below to get the timestamp of last geberated log file

(ls -ltr eCustomerCME* | grep ^- | tail -1 | awk ' { print $6,$7,$8 } ')

I want to modify this command to search for log files within last 2 hrs but returning the same result as of now. how do I do that. can you pls suggest a solution.

thanks