Home / ubuntu / Questions / 189645
Accepted
Wolfy
Asked: 2012-09-17 22:43:59 +0800 CST

Alternatives for 'egrep -o "success|error|fail" <filename> | sort | uniq -c'

  • 772

I sometime need to check some logs and I do this with this command:

egrep -o "success|error|fail" <filename> | sort | uniq -c

Sample input:

test error on line 10
test connect success
test insert success
test started at 00:00
test delete  fail

Sample output:

1 error
1 fail
2 success

I would like to know if someone knows a way to do this with a shorter command?

Before you ask why I would like to do this with an different command... No special reason, I'm just curious :)

command-line

6 Answers

  1. No, I think that you are as good as it gets. Naturally, you could do it with one perl script, 

    perl -nle  's/.*(error|fail|success).*/$1/ && $a{$_}++ ; END {  print "$_ $a{$_}" for keys %a } ' test.txt

    ...but it is more complex and less intuitive.

    • 4
  2. Best Answer

    Here is the awk way of doing it

    awk 'BEGIN{RS=" "}/success/{s++}/fail/{f++}/error/{e++}END{print "Success:"s" Failed:"f" Error:"e}' abc

    But all these one liners will be bit lengthier than our good old grep

    • 4

  3. Not much shorter, but since you don't really need the regular expression, there's fgrep (grep -F).

    fgrep 'success
error
fail' "$filename" | sort | uniq -c

    another way to write the same thing in bash:

    fgrep $'success\nerror\nfail' "$filename" | sort | uniq -c
    • 2

  4. You could write a simple bash script and then call the script, like:

    #!/bin/bash
egrep -o "success|error|fail" "$1" | sort | uniq -c

    and save it as (for example) myscript.sh. Then do a chmod +x myscript.sh and you can call it like myscript.sh <filename>.

    • 1

  5. Your command, while short and sweet, is a rather circuitous way to count occurrences of a term. I'd probably take the blunt, direct approach and use grep's -c flag (which does exactly that) inside of a shell loop:

    for i in success test fail; do echo `grep -c $i <filename>` $i; done

    Not as short, not as exciting, potentially faster for large logfiles (no sort). I'd say it's a wash.

    • 0

  6. This could be a dummy answer but I think, in this case, sort is quite useless; maybe you can omit it. Nevertheless here we are using three different commands for three different actions.

    We can short it if some of them con be reached with some option of grep, but I don't see which... :)

    • -1