CODEWITHSUNDEEP
bash
RD7
RD7

Reputation: 708

sort lines by second and minute

I have a very long not sorted log file from many sources, that every line of it has the time it was written in it. i want to sort the log by the time, the problem is there was no convention where to write the time in the line, so I don't have any pattern base on delimiter or location in the line that i can filter by. the only thing i know, is the format of time which is: hh:mm:ss. lines for example:

filename time

time

filename date time

filename exception date time

...

how can i sort the file using this format - even though I don't know exact location in the line? i need to be able to sore it by hours, minutes and seconds

Upvotes: 0

Views: 648

Answers (1)

zeppelin
zeppelin

Reputation: 9365

You can use sed to extract the time (formatted as hh:mm:ss), prepend it at the beginning of the line, then use this new field for sort, and then remove it again with cut, like that:

sed 's/\(.*\)\([0-9]\{2\}:[0-9]\{2\}:[0-9]\{2\}\)/\2\t\1\2/' data|
sort -t: -k3,3|cut -f2-

(this will sort by seconds, change this to -k2,2 or -k1,1 to sort by minutes or hours instead)

Upvotes: 2

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