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Asked: 2026-05-18T04:02:21+00:00

Ok guys I’m really at a dead end here, don’t know what else to

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Ok guys I’m really at a dead end here, don’t know what else to try…

I am writing a script for some e-mail statistics, one of the things it needs to do is calculate the complete size of all messages in the maillog, this is what I wrote so far:

egrep ' HOSTNAME sendmail\[.*.from=.*., size=' maillog | awk '{print $8}' |  
tr "," "+" | tr -cd '[:digit:][=+=]' | sed 's/^/(/;s/+$/)\/1048576/' |  
bc -ql | awk -F "." '{print $1}'

And here is a sample line from my maillog:

Nov 15 09:08:48 HOSTNAME sendmail[3226]: oAF88gWb003226:  
from=<name.lastname@domain.com>, size=40992, class=0, nrcpts=24,  
msgid=<E08A679A54DA4913B25ADC48CC31DD7F@domain.com>, proto=ESMTP,  
daemon=MTA1, relay=[1.1.1.1]

So I’ll try to explain it step by step:

First I grep through the file to find all the lines containing the actual “size”, next i print the 8th field, in this case “size=40992,”.

Next I replace all the comma characters with a plus sign.

Then I delete everything except the digits and the plus sign.

Then I replace the beginning of the line with a “(“, and I replace the last extra plus sign with a “)” followed by “/1048576”. So i get a huge expression looking like this:

“(1+2+3+4+5…+n)/1048576”

Because I want to add up all the individual message sizes and divide it so I get the result in MB.

The last awk command is when I get a decimal number I really don’t care for precision so i just print the part before the decimal point.

The problem is, this doesn’t work… And I could swear it was working at one point, could it be my expression is too long for bc to handle?

Thanks if you took the time to read through 🙂

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    I think a one-line awk script will work too. It matches any line that your egrep pattern matches, then for those lines it splits the eighth record by the = sign and adds the second part (the number) to the SUM variable. When it sees the END of the file it prints out the value of SUM/1048576 (or the byte count in Mibibytes).

    awk '/ HOSTNAME sendmail\[.*.from=.*., size=/{ split($8,a,"=") ; SUM += a[2] } END { print SUM/1048576 }' maillog
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