macOS help with grep and bash script

[wesg]

I'm getting into this bash programming thing, but I need some help from the programming gurus out there.

I want to take the output of my uptime script

20:07  up  1:01, 2 users, load averages: 0.36 0.17 0.14

and only use the text between 20:07 and , 2 users (ie. proper result is up 1:01)

So far I have

uptime | grep '.*'

. I've used grep with PHP before, but never anything like this. Suggestions?

 

[HiRez]

You might be able to use grep, but I'd probably use awk instead and let it use its builtin tokenizing features:

awk '{print $2,$3}' uptime.txt

(This assumes each line has the same format, I don't know if that's true in your case.)

You could also use the cut utility, or others.

 

[mysticwhiskey]

I'm getting into this bash programming thing, but I need some help from the programming gurus out there.

I want to take the output of my uptime script

20:07  up  1:01, 2 users, load averages: 0.36 0.17 0.14

and only use the text between 20:07 and , 2 users (ie. proper result is up 1:01)

So far I have

uptime | grep '.*'

. I've used grep with PHP before, but never anything like this. Suggestions?

Hi,

I'm by no means competent with grep, but this seems to work:

uptime | egrep 'up *[0123456789:]*' -o

Explanation:

egrep = matches a regexp pattern (same as grep -e)
stuff between single quotes = regexp pattern
-o = output only that part of the input that matches the pattern

I'm sure there's a more elegant way to do this though!

 

[laprej]

uptime | sed s/,//g | awk '{print $3}'

 

[lee1210]

There's probably a billion ways to do this, but this works too:

uptime | awk -F'(  |,)' '{print $2}'

-Lee

 

[psingh01]

There's probably a billion ways to do this, but this works too:

uptime | awk -F'(  |,)' '{print $2}'

-Lee

As HiRez said, this is how you could do it with cut

uptime | cut -d',' -f1 | cut -d' ' -f2-5

 

[ChrisA]

There is a command that does this directly it's called "cut"

uptime | cut -c 6-100 - | cut -d , -f 1 -

 

[Cromulent]

Who ever said Mac OS X was a dumbed down operating system obviously failed to look very far under the surface.

No matter how far I think I'm getting with using the Terminal I always end up finding 100 different ways of completing the same task. Heh, useful info in this thread thanks.

 

[costabunny]

this is why I switched back to mac, and am busy converting the unclean...

The beauty of a well thought out GUI, with the power of Unix just a click away - Ahhh bisto...!

and yes there is a plethora of solutions to your script, personally I love using awk with grep. - try that M$!!

 

[lee1210]

<snip>
try that M$!!

While it's not as elegant, I have managed to make my Windows machine at work resemble a real workstation with Cygwin and an X server running under it. I have gcc, awk, grep, vim, etc. all at my disposal locally. I prefer my Mac or a linux system by far, but wanted to point this out for those stuck with Windows in certain scenarios.

-Lee