Shell Programming and Scripting

That works a treat - Thanks for your help.



FYI
The ls -ltr | tail -1 | cut -d " " -f10 doesnt work as the field separator is not unique - the length varies depending on the file size.

The -l option for ls command is unnecessary :

Code:

ls -tr | tail -1

Jean-Pierre.

Command we tried using to grep ERROR from lastest 1 log files from 5 logs files available in that particular directory is:
grep ERROR $(ls -lrt | awk '{ file=$NF } END { print file }')
grep: can't open DistributeImageFilesToTarget_10_dataLocations_PhillipinesDataLocations.xml.log

if i give ls -lrt for all the files in that diretory

-------r-- 1 egdevbb intdev 5022 Apr 2 05:13 DistributeDataFilesToTarget_4_dataLocations_ChinaDataLocations.xml.log
-------r-- 1 egdevbb intdev 1672 Apr 2 05:14 DistributeImageFilesToTarget_14_dataLocations_WHQDataLocations.xml.log
-------r-- 1 egdevbb intdev 7480 Apr 2 05:15 DistributeImageFilesToTarget_60_dataLocations_IndonesiaDataLocations.xml.log
-------r-- 1 egdevbb intdev 2113 Apr 2 05:34 DistributeImageFilesToTarget_8_dataLocations_MalaysiaDataLocations.xml.log
-------r-- 1 egdevbb intdev 2107 Apr 2 05:39 DistributeImageFilesToTarget_10_dataLocations_PhillipinesDataLocations.xml.log

(Note ls -one rather than ls -ell).

Code:

LATEST_FILENAME="`ls -1tr ????????_??.log 2>/dev/null | tail -1`"

if [ ! "${FILENAME}""X" = "X" ]
then
        grep <your pattern> "${LATEST_FILENAME}"
fi