CODEWITHSUNDEEP
shelldateecho
rouble
rouble

Reputation: 18191

Prefixing logs with date in shell script

I have a shell script with a lot of echo statements. I want to prefix each line of output with the time/date.

So, I replaced every 

echo "Some text1"
echo "Some text2"

with

echo "`date +%y/%m/%d_%H:%M:%S`:: some text1"
echo "`date +%y/%m/%d_%H:%M:%S`:: some text2"

This is rather ugly. Is there anyway to create an alias (or the analog to a #define in C), to make it cleaner.

Obviously, doing something like:

DATE=`date +%y/%m/%d_%H:%M:%S`
echo "$DATE:: some text1"
echo "$DATE:: some text2"

... would not work, because in that case the DATE is only calculated once and each echo would have the same date.

I am thinking about replacing every echo with a print function call, that does the prefixing. I want to know if anyone has any other/better ideas.

Upvotes: 12

Views: 16520

Answers (6)

javaPlease42
javaPlease42

Reputation: 4963

If you are using KornShell (ksh) here is a function:

#** Description: Logs stringToLog to scriptLog using a standard date format.
#** Parameters:  ${1} stringToLog (Required)
#**              ${2} scriptLog (Required)
log() {
        echo "[`date +'%Y/%m/%d %H:%M:%S%s'`]: ${1}"  >> "${2}"
}

Example of calling the above function:

log "Starting foo script." "${PWD}/logs/foo.log"

Upvotes: -1

user unknown
user unknown

Reputation: 36229

Or just store the format:

format="+%y/%m/%d_%H:%M:%S::"
echo $(date $format) some text

Not so much quoting is needed, btw.

Upvotes: 2

abi
abi

Reputation: 41

#!/bin/bash
echo() {
    printf "`date`: $1\n"
}

echo "test"

--

will result in:

abi@cefix:~$ sh test.sh

Fr 18. Mär 13:33:35 CET 2011: test

so you dont have to change all your echo statements.

Upvotes: 4

Jé Queue
Jé Queue

Reputation: 10637

Yes, shell function or conversely use an alias:

alias now="date +%s" # or your specific date format
echo "`now` some text"

Upvotes: 3

Gonzalo
Gonzalo

Reputation: 21175

If you're using bash...:

#!/bin/bash

function myecho() {
        echo "`date +%y/%m/%d_%H:%M:%S`:: $@"
}

myecho "hola"

Upvotes: 4

mob
mob

Reputation: 118605

echodate()
{
    echo `date +%y/%m/%d_%H:%M:%S`:: $*
}

echodate Some text 1
echodate Some text 2

Upvotes: 21

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