Pipe grep result to awk with “: ” as field separator

awkgrep

I would like to filter the result of a grep command, eg :

myRepo/path/to/my/file.php:123:                             error_log(' - myError');

If I do the following, it works.

echo " myRepo/path/to/my/file.php:123: error_log(' – myError');" | awk -F': ' '{print $1}'

But when it's the result of a grep command, it outputs the whole line, why ?

grep -rn "myError" | awk -F': ' '{print $1}'

I have CentOS 6 with Awk 3.1.7, bash 4.1.2

Best Answer

Your awk delimiter is a : and a space, but I would guess that your code is using tab for indentation (and hence does not match just on a space).

You can try to change your grep to the following (which causes awk to match on : and the tab character).

grep -rn "myError"|awk -F':\t' '{ print $1 }'

This works for me using bash 4.3.46 and awk 4.1.3 on slackware linux.

Related Solutions

Bash – using awk in a bash script with if

Awk is the wrong solution here. How about:

if [[ "$task" =~ ^Clean ]]; then
  echo hello
fi

There's also a sneaky substitution method:

if [ "${task/#Clean/}" != "$task" ]; then
  echo hello
fi

But I find that to be far less readable.

Chris reckons case is tidier... let's try that out:

case $task in
  Clean*)
    echo hello
    ;;
esac

My aesthetic sense says "hell no with bells on", and fiddling with the formatting (Clean*) echo hello;; or similar) won't help much, IMAO. If you want a conditional, use an if, I say.

Bash script – print from line N to EOF

Single quotes '' mean, "use this exact string." They do not substitute variable names with their values. So that's why you have to manually write in 995. Does that help?

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Bash – using awk in a bash script with if

Bash script – print from line N to EOF

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