Question

I have a log file which contains a number of error lines, such as:

Failed to add [e-mail] to database

I can filter these lines with a single grep call:

grep -E 'Failed to add (.*) to database'

This works fine, but what I’d really like to do is have grep (or another Unix command I pass the output into) only output the email address part of the matched line.

Is this possible?

Answer 1

You can use sed:

grep -E 'Failed to add (.*) to database'| sed 's/'Failed to add \(.*\) to database'/\1'