Shell Programming and Scripting

I have a file called abc which has 3677 application logins ..Here is the format.

web_1323132.log:Fri Nov 2 06:27:28 : KUMAR MEENA MKUMAR 7655 IND015 011 RANDOM v5.1.45 webenv random1 02-Nov-2007 06:27:20.

I am trying to get a list of all users(ex. KUMAR MEENA) which uses our application "Random" which is hosted on random1 server.
Using cut command, we can do this, But I am not sure about exact syntax.
Please help.

You don't want to use 'cut'. Try this:

Code:

awk -F: '/RANDOM/{split($5,a," ");print a[1],a[2]}' abc

Good enough..It works...Thanks a lot...

Could you explain how this awk works, all I know it somehow splits field 5 into the first and last name, but how did field 5 because the name. Thanks.

When splitting fields with 'awk', the default field-separator is a pattern that matches whitespace. Commonly, data is arranged in columns separated by a special character like a comma or colon, so in those cases we must set the field separator.

awk -F:

Now that ":" is the separator, we can always take the 3rd column by using "$3". Unfortunately, in this case, one of the fields included a timestamp (and two extra colons!) so I used $5 to indicate where the name starts, even though HH:MM:SS is really one value.

The text between the slashes is a regex, so only matching lines (those with "RANDOM" in them) are considered. Then, $5 is split into array "a" using a blank space as a separator. Thus the first two elements, a[1] and a[2] must be the first/last name.

Sometimes 'cut' can be the better choice when the columns are of fixed width, but it didn't appear to be the case here. For instance, won't the date get wider by one byte after the 9th of the month? In those cases it's better to use something like 'awk' that can separate the fields based on a pattern.

Actually, cut doesn't care what length the fields are if you use the -d:

Then you can specify which "field" with -f[n] where [n] is the actual field number you want.

Code:

echo "This is a: Test of the cut: command" | cut -d: -f2
 Test of the cut

Note that the white space is considered just another character in the field after changing the delimiter.

I cannot vouch for all OS versions of cut, but it works on OS X.

Guess This Mite Work!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

cut -d":" -f5 aa | cut -d" " -f1-3

Regards,
Anand