hi everyone! currently im working on with my firewall logs on a daily basis. i am using log utility of linksys router and have it configured over my redhat box. i check the logs of the previos day with the following commands:

grep '\[OUT\]' lsys_monitor.log | grep '2006-05-30'

the problem is it takes me a bit longer to wait for the logs to display. i am curious if somehow i can use cron to do the job for me, and pipe its output to a tmp file like:

0 5 * * * grep '\[OUT\]' lsys_monitor.log | grep '2006-05-30' > /tmp/log.txt

but the problem with this command is that everyday i have to edit my crontab entry to get the exact log date like in this case the "2006-05-30" entry.

if somehow i could replace that entry with a command that would automatically get the previous date as the cron job runs...

can u please give me suggestions? or any advice on how will i make it... thank you ppl in advance!!

You could just run the cron job a few seconds before midnite...

Update: Here's a sample crontab entry:

hi there!! tnx for the immediate reply.. ive tried the command but when i checked it today.. nothing happens.. what exactly will that command do??

59 23 * * * /bin/grep '\[OUT\]' lsys_monitor.log | /bin/grep "`/bin/date '+%Y-%m-%d'`" > /tmp/log.txt

At 23:59 (one minute before midnight), grep for the string '[OUT]' in the file lsys_monitor.log (you need to specify the path; this is all you provided), then pipe the result to another grep which will look for the date in the format yyyy-mm-dd (as you specified in your request), then send the result to the file /tmp/log.txt.

As noted above, you need to specify the actual location of the lsys_monitor.log file.

whew!! thanks agen.. sorry for my stupidity..

thanks dude! now it works just the way i want it to be.. just have 2 remove the double-quotation (" ") though to get it working... thanks agen..