UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hi, I'm not good in scripting, maybe someone can help me.
I need to delete the lines that contains the last month date from a text file. Each line has the following date format:
[08/Nov/2001:17:06:58 +0300]

So the script should check the actual month, and delete all the lines that contains the past month. The script runs once a month, of course.

As you can see, I know what I need but I don't know how to do it.

If you know how to do it, please, enlight me with you knowledge....

Thanks

Hi,

This is fairly easy to accomplish.

You could use grep.

First copy your logfile to a *.old filename.
$ cp logfile logfile.old

Then grep -v to get rid of undesirable lines containing the pattern you want to delete.
$ cat logfile.old |grep -v "Nov/2001" > logfile

OR

Better, you can just save your logs to *.old1, *.old2 when the first day of the month arrives, run from cron.

# minutes (0-59) hours (0-23) dates (1-31) months (1-12) days (0-6)
0 0 1 * * /some/log/cleahup.sh

$ vi cleanup.sh

cp /some/log/file1 /some/log/file2
cp /some/log/file /some/log/file1
> /some/log/file

OK I will use the second option. It was more simple than I thought, thank you.