UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hi: I have an overly large log file because of my own couple of IPs. I have been doing this:

sed '/174.114.270.1/d' accesslog.txt > newaccesslog.txt
sed '/192.168.1.1/d' newaccesslog.txt > accesslog.txt

To strip out those two IP's. Then I did a man sed but I didn't see how to use an or to just or them. Is there a better way to do this? That log is my apache access log so it needs to be written to at all times (meaning I can't rename it not even for a second or I'll lose data....although that last write probably causes some problems). What I'd like as an end result is this -- just strip out those two IP's from the log file (not other log files as a result).

Kind regards.

thats possible only if you have -i option in your sed man page

Code:

sed -e '/174.114.270.1/d' -e '/192.168.1.1/d' accesslog.txt > newaccesslog.txt 
mv newaccesslog.txt accesslog.txt

Code:

awk '!/174.114.270.1/ && !/192.168.1.1/' accesslog.txt > newaccesslog.txt 
mv newaccesslog.txt accesslog.txt

Regards

Ah, I do have a -i (edit files in place). sed v4.1.5

So to remove all entire lines containing one string or another from a log file (without moving, disrupting, etc. the original log file)

sed -i -e '/174.114.270.1/d' -e '/192.168.1.1/d' accesslog.txt

I tried this on a test file and it worked. Wanted to follow up for confirmation in case I created a new problem.

Kind regards.

What I meant to say at the end of my last post was that I was hoping for someone to confirm that my new sed statement looked like it won't cause any problems. The only thing I noticed that was kind of quirky was that the log file is owned by apache, I'm logged in as root, apache does not have a shell account so I can't su to it. So when I run the above sed utility, my log file is now owned by root and I must chown it afterwards. Other than that --- it works great. Thanks for the help.

Kind regards.

You could do something like this (maybe in a script?):

Code:

sed -i -e '/174.114.270.1/d' -e '/192.168.1.1/d' accesslog.txt && chown apache accesslog.txt

Regards