I am looking at an access log from tomcat which has entires such as:

Question

Asked: June 3, 20262026-06-03T18:30:36+00:00 2026-06-03T18:30:36+00:00

96.28.193.125 - - [10/May/2012:07:08:39 +0000] 0 "GET / " 200 123 "-" "-"

I want to use sed to just pull out the datetimes.

So I just see:

[10/May/2012:07:08:39 +0000]

I understand it should be something like this:

sed -e 's/oldstuff//g' inputFileName > outputFileName

Where oldstuff should be a regular expression to get text that is not between square brackets.

I haven’t a clue how to express that in a regular expression and would appreciate any tips?

My best effort is:

sed -e 's
/[^\[(.*?)\]]//g' inputfilename > outputFileName

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Editorial Team · Answer 1 · 2026-06-03T18:30:40+00:00

Editorial Team

Try this:

  sed -e 's;^.*\(\[.*\]\).*$;\1;' inputFileName > outputFileName

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