UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

I want to fetch text after the first occurance of the word "started at"
i.e. consider a text written below...

echo 'hi how r u '
Started at MON Jan 11 00:03:24 EST 2009
echo 'hi how is ur job goin on'
Started at Sun Jan 11 00:03:24 EST 2004
Started at TUE Jan 11 00:03:24 EST 2005
Started at WED Jan 11 00:03:24 EST 2006
Started at THU Jan 11 00:03:24 EST 2007

I want to fetch only MON Jan 11 00:03:24 EST 2009 (i.e. only the first occurance of text after started at....)

Please provide the solution...Thnx in advance...

Code:

perl -ne 'print $1 if /^Started at (.*)$/;' input.txt

thnx for the reply..
I am still not able to run this command.
i want to copy the timestamp after first occurence of started at and then direct it to some variable

When it does not work, show what did not work.
Also the aspect of writing it to a variable is new.

Try this:

Code:

root@isau02:/data/tmp/testfeld> VAR=`sed -e '/^Started at/!d; q' -e 's/^Started at \(.*\)/\1/' infile`
root@isau02:/data/tmp/testfeld> echo $VAR
MON Jan 11 00:03:24 EST 2009

bash-2.05$ VAR=`sed '/^Started at/!d; q' DPRPT504.log| sed 's/^Started at \(.*\)/\1/'`
++ sed '/^Started at/!d; q' DPRPT504.log
++ sed 's/^Started at \(.*\)/\1/'
+ VAR=
bash-2.05$ echo $VAR
+ echo
bash-2.05$ pwd

here DPRPT504.log is a file from where i want to capture the start date

Please use [ code ] and [ /code ] tags when displaying code, data or logs etc.

Just do

Code:

grep "^Started at" DPRPT504.log| head

and post the output here with code-tags.

Code:

bash-2.05$ grep "^Started at" DPRPT600.log| head
+ grep '^Started at' DPRPT600.log
+ head
bash-2.05$ echo $head
+ echo