UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

here is a list of the commands and what output they produce (btw I use Leopard OS X):

uptime | cut -d" " -f4-8 | sed 's/,//g'

-> up 9 mins 2 users



uptime | sed 's/, *[0-9]* users.*$//'

-> 0:18 up 10 mins



uptime | sed 's/.*up \(.*\),.user.*/\1/'
-> 0:19 up 10 mins, 2 users, load averages: 0,61 0,54 0,31



I want it look like that: x days y h z min
I do not want to see the current time, the word up, commas, colons nor the load averages. Furthermore if the machine has only be running for a couple of minutes it should look like that: z min
-> so the output should print nothing else except the minutes (for hours the same: it should not display days yet)
I have been playing around with uptime | awk etc. but this command did not produce the required output since it changes depending on how long the machine has been running for.
Is there a command that solves my problem or is it impossible to produce the required output due to the changing uptime of the computer?

Franklin52's last attempt was very close....

Code:

$ echo "0:19 up 10 mins, 2 users, load averages: 0,61 0,54 0,31" | sed 's/.*up \(.*\),.user.*/\1/'
0:19 up 10 mins, 2 users, load averages: 0,61 0,54 0,31
$ echo "0:19 up 10 mins, 2 users, load averages: 0,61 0,54 0,31" | sed 's/.*up \(.*\),.*user.*/\1/'
10 mins
$

By having that ",.user" only 1 character would be allowed between the comma and the string "user". I changed it to ",.*user" which allows zero or more characters.

@perderabo

the command you used does not work either because you don't use the command uptime you use echo "0:19 up 10 mins, 2 users, load averages: 0,61 0,54 0,31" | sed 's/.*up \(.*\),.user.*/\1/'
and that command will always produce 10 mins as the uptime
and if I change it to
uptime | sed 's/.*up \(.*\),.*user.*/\1/'
the output is the following
-> 6:58

which is my current uptime! (thx so far)

but how do I replace the colon with 'h' and how do I insert a 'min' after the minutes?

And can someone explain this command sed 's/.*up \(.*\),.*user.*/\1/' to me?

Thanks a lot guys for the help! I appreciate it!

update:
my attempt at soving the problem looks like this

uptime | sed 's/.*up \(.*\),.*user.*/\1/' | awk '{sub(":", "h ", $0); sub(" ", "", $0); print "uptime:" $0}'

But I do not know how to insert a 'min' directly after the minutes and how I can get rid of the two white spaces in front of the ' xh' (x for the number of hours).