Question

I can use the following command to search log files over the past 10 days:

find . -type f -mtime -10 |xargs grep -i -n 'exception' 2> /dev/null

But i want to further limit the search for lines in the file that are logged between 6am and 6pm. I’m wondering how i can modify the grep command to filter these if the lines look like this:

2012-09-04 03:50:41,658 [MainLogger: ] EXCEPTION  AppLog - some exception 1
2012-09-04 10:01:32,902 [MainLogger: ] EXCEPTION  AppLog - some exception 2
2012-09-04 15:39:51,901 [MainLogger: ] EXCEPTION  AppLog - some exception 3
2012-09-04 18:12:51,901 [MainLogger: ] EXCEPTION  AppLog - some exception 4

In the above case on lines 2 and 3 should be returned since they are between 6am and 6pm.

any help would be appreciated

Answer 1

One easy ugly way to do it could be adding a lot of greps, like this :

find . -type f -mtime -10 |xargs grep -i -n 'exception' | grep -v " 00" | grep -v " 01" | ... | grep -v " 18" | grep -v " 19" ... 2> /dev/null

Or more concisely :

find . -type f -mtime -10 |xargs grep -i -n 'exception' | grep -v -e " \(0[012345]\|18\|19\|2[0123]\)" 2> /dev/null