Hi guys,

I need help on how to start a script. I have archives or list of people who borrow things from me. I am using centos linux and I need help on how to start to write a script which extracts certain information like the name, device#, mac addie, leasing date instead all the other junk stored in the file. I want these information to be in comma delimited text file that could be run from desktop or something.

I read a lot on db extracting but this is not a database, I know how to put in stuff in database from comma delimited file but I don't know how to make a script take an input file, extract certain information and save it in comma delimited text file.

Any pointers or tutorial or anything will be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

--p

Depending on the format of the file, sed or awk should work to break it up for you.

I kind of didn't understand that. Can you please expand on what you mean? Thank you. Is it grammer for writing script?

--p

sed or awk are programs that can be used to edit files. Should be able to read a file into the program and have it parse through the file, looking for spaces, commas, colons, words, etc.. and use those "landmarks" to format the file into the format you want it in.

This link might help to understand what I am talking about.

http://builder.com.com/5100-6372-1050917.html

Sorry, I am not very good with sed and awk. Wish I was, they can be very useful.
Good luck.

man sed
man awk
man grep

This sounds like it would be a good job for perl even.

www.perl.org

Thanks I will look into them. But one more question. Is this good enough for high level scripting? Like if

lease IP{
starts 3 2002/02/05 05:57:46;
ends 3 2003/05/26 06:57:46;
set ddns-fwd-name = "YOUR-dns";
set ddns-txt = "somerandomintegers";
client-hostname "YOUR-randints";
}

host vwilma-1 {
dynamic;
hardware ethernet 00:02:40:24:af:23;
}

and with this information from a file i can produce a script that can produce a comma-delimited text file in the format "user, device #, mac addr, ip addr, lease start, lease end".

Will it work with this kind of information? How do I go about doing this. Thanks again.

--p

Yes, you should be able to write a script that will format that for you. I have seen perl scripts that do something similar to this.

May be you can show an example? It would be nice to visualize. I am not too much involved with perl but I do have hands on on php, mysql etc....

Thanks for all the help. I really appreciate it. It is helping me a lot.

--p

Also, What kind of scripting language supports or integrates best for this problem?

Probably in your case, you'd have to break the format up, you could probably use grep to search for each of your terms or columns then use the split function to lay out each column for your comma separated file or output and then use the join function within perl to rebuild it how you want.

perldoc -f <perl function>

So:

perldoc -f split # will give you the documentation on the split function.

This is definitly a job for perl..