Question

Hi I want to delete a line from a file which matches particular pattern
the code I am using is

BEGIN {
       FS = "!";
       stopDate = "date +%Y%m%d%H%M%S";
       deletedLineCtr = 0;   #diagnostics counter, unused at this time
      }
      {
     if( $7 < stopDate )
          {
           deletedLineCtr++;
          }
      else
           print $0
      }

The code says that the file has lines “!” separated and 7th field is a date yyyymmddhhmmss format. The script deletes a line whose date is less than the system date. But this doesn’t work. Can any one tell me the reason?

Answer 1

Is the awk(1) assignment due Tuesday? Really, awk?? 🙂

Ok, I wasn’t sure exactly what you were after so I made some guesses. This awk program gets the current time of day and then removes every line in the file less than that. I left one debug print in.

BEGIN {
  FS = "!"
  stopDate = strftime("%Y%m%d%H%M%S")
  print "now: ", stopDate
}
{ if ($7 >= stopDate) print $0 }

---

$ cat t2.data
!!!!!!20080914233848
!!!!!!20090914233848
!!!!!!20100914233848
$ awk -f t2.awk < t2.data
now:  20090914234342
!!!!!!20100914233848
$