Re: [gentoo-user] Potential Supid question re Grep

[Nick Rout]

On Fri, 08 Jul 2005 00:54:46 +0200
Richard Fish wrote:

> Michael Thompson wrote:
>
> >I am trying to extract information in my logs for a abuse department and am
> >using the code:
> >
> >Code:
> >
> >zcat /var/log/messages.*?.gz | grep 212.56.68.108 >> /home/mike/abuse1
> >
> >The logs are standard: messages.??.gz
> >
> >However, when I examine the output, it starts on the 1st may, however the logs
> >contain details from the 25th Febuary. What am I doing wrong?
> >
> >
> >
>
> Are you *sure* the February information is not there??  I think this
> probably has nothing to do with the grep command, but more with the
> shell expansion.  When I do "ls -l /var/log/messages.*?.gz", I get the
> following:
>
> -rw-------  1 root root 696588 Feb 21 09:00 /var/log/messages.1.gz
> -rw-------  1 root root 795675 Feb 14 15:40 /var/log/messages.2.gz
> -rw-------  1 root root 491964 Feb  6 19:00 /var/log/messages.3.gz
> -rw-------  1 root root 482189 Jan 31 05:10 /var/log/messages.4.gz
>
> Notice that the dates are in reverse order.  If I were to cat those
> together, the oldest information would be at the end.  I think you want:
>
> zcat `ls -rt /var/log/messages.*?.gz` | grep 212.56.68.108 >>
> /home/mike/abuse1


another potential problem is that if you have 10 or more rotated log
files you will get them in the order:

/var/log/messages.1.gz
/var/log/messages.10.gz
/var/log/messages.2.gz



>
> -Richard
>
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-- 
Nick Rout

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