Search logfiles for specific words

kinetik · 03-29-2006, 06:37 PM

Hi my fellow *Nix guys and gals!

Need some help again.

I'm trying to run a script that will check various services and put it's findings in a txt file, then search a couple of logfiles for specific words (eg. "ERROR"; "Error"; "error") then add the results into the same txt file. Maybe in format "10 instances of error found in logfile1.txt."

I'm stuck at how to search for specific words.

I know you can do less, then /<whatever you want to search for>, but this won't cut it. I need a command I can run that will automatically search the logfile contents and return a number of matching objects.

Any ideas?

Vgui · 03-29-2006, 06:53 PM

grep is your tool for this one.

Code:

grep -i "bla" logfile.log

You can pass it plenty of switches, for example -i means case insensitive. You can even pipe the results through further grep statements:

Code:

grep -i "bla" logfile.log | grep -v "info" | wc -l

Here you are grepping for bla (case insensitive), then removing any results that have "info" in them (that's what the -v switch is for), and finally performing a line count on the result.
That should get you going, but check out the man pages, and good luck!

kinetik · 03-29-2006, 07:04 PM

Vgui, you're a star! Thank you very, very much!

EDIT: Sorry Vgui, just one more question. Is there a way to search for eg. "bla", but only any entries from today's date? The logfiles I'm about to query is updated on a constant basis and adds a date before any new entries. Doing a search for bla in this case will result in a lot of entries, but there may not be any entries for today's date...