Hi, I am new to Linux and the full capabilities of grep, so I'm having some difficulty figuring out how to obtain the information I want. I'm using grep to search if specific servers are listed in my local nameserver like this:

chknsv NSV | egrep 'box1|box2|box3'

Where chknsv is a function to list all items in the nameserver that include substring NSV in the line.

Ideally, what is returned from egrep is a list like this:
$NSV - box1 - 40000 - tcp
$NSV - box2 - 40000 - tcp
$NSV - box3 - 40000 - tcp

(The first column represents Service name, the second Host name, the third Port, and the fourth Protocol)

What I am wondering is how to check what is returned from egrep to make sure that all of the server names I searched for are included? The exit status of the egrep command returns 0 when anything is returned regardless of how many server names I was searching for. So, it would return 0 even if only one or two of the three servers I'm searching for are listed. This kind of scenario is what I'm trying to detect to verify whether or not all of the server names I searched for are active in the nameserver.

I know it can be done with multiple calls to egrep, but that seems really clunky to me - I'm hoping there's a more elegant solution that I'm just unaware of.

Any advice/suggestions would be greatly appreciated! Thanks!

chknsv NSV | egrep 'box1|box2|box3'

Well, not that it's what you're asking, but this could be changed to:

chknsv NSV | egrep 'box[123]'

to get the same result.

If you don't want to run it twice stick the output in a tmp file, and then run "wc" on it.

#!/bin/bash
MY_CHKNSV=/var/tmp/my_chknsv.$$
export MY_CHKNSV

chknsv NSV | egrep 'box[123]' >$MY_CHKNSV
numlines=`wc -l $MY_CHKNSV`

if [ $numlines -ne 3 ]
then
echo "error: did not get all three boxes"
< do what ever you want to do about this issue, etc >
else
echo "got all three boxes"
<do what you want now that you've got exactly three boxes returned>
fi

rm $MY_CHKNSV
exit 0

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How many servers do you have? Don't answer, just enter into variable

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Thank you, Lnthink! That will work perfectly. I wasn't sure how to export the results to a file. Now, I can expand on that and have my script check the number of lines, and if less than 3, find out which server isn't listed.

I'll also keep the chknsv NSV | egrep 'box[123]' for future use. For this, I was providing a generic example. The boxes I'm actually searching for have unique names.

Okay, so if you need to have a list it will be much easier:

Once you are talking columns, I would suggest using awk.

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