Grab time from string

kram66 · 05-10-2009, 08:45 PM

I've developed a script that gathers the time from a string using the cut function, however one of the problems is that the location of the time can change, therefore I can't use the cut function.

rw-rw-rw- some text might go here 10:50 AM some other text might go here

I need to grab the 10:40 AM from the string. What is the best way to do this?

kellinwood · 05-10-2009, 09:23 PM

Regular expression matching can be used to solve this problem....

echo "rw-rw-rw- some text might go here 10:50 AM some other text might go here" | grep -Po '\d\d:\d\d (AM|PM)'
10:50 AM

time=`echo "rw-rw-rw- some text might go here 10:50 AM some other text might go here" | grep -Po '\d\d:\d\d (AM|PM)'`
echo $time
10:50 AM