[techtalk] help with sorting text in a file

[Jeff Dike]

slandrum at turing.csc.smith.edu said:
> On Fri, 12 May 2000, alissa bader wrote:
> > Specifically, anything containing the
> > string "QAA."  Tried doing a grep, but I got the
> > entire line again, not just the portion of it that
> > contained "QAA."

> what part of the line do you need to grab, other than QAA? got some
> sample data? 

You wouldn't be grepping a mail log would you?

slandrum is right - you've told us not very much.  I'll assume that the QAA is 
part of a field, like this, except I've got LAA instead:
	May 12 11:39:45 ccure sendmail[2245]: LAA02244: to=<jdike at localhost>, 
delay=00:00:01, xdelay=00:00:00, mailer=local, stat=Sent

Here, the LAA is in field 6 (starting from 1), so awk would be a good choice.  
If you just want that field, and you want it sorted by the rest of that field 
for some reason, you could do this:
	cat /var/log/maillog | \
	awk '{print $6}' | \ # The *AA fields come out here
	grep LAA | \         # Only the LAA field survive this
	sed 's/LAA//' | \    # Strip the LAA off, leaving the number
	sort -n              # Sort them

If you wanted other parts of the line, the awk command could be something like
	awk '{print $6, $7, $1, $2, $3}'
which would give you "LAA02244: to=<jdike at localhost> May 12 11:39:45".  This 
would let you select or sort by date and username.

If all of this is barking up the wrong tree, then you'll have to be somewhat 
more specific.

				Jeff