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dategrep-2.00
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NAME

dategrep - print lines matching a date range

SYNOPSIS

dategrep --start "12:00" --end "12:15" syslog
dategrep --end "12:15" --format "%b %d %H:%M:%S" syslog
dategrep --last-minutes 5 syslog
cat syslog | dategrep --end "12:15"

DESCRIPTION

Do you even remember how often in your life you needed to find lines in a log file falling in a date range? And how often you build brittle regexs in grep to match entries spanning over a hour change?

dategrep hopes to solve this problem once and for all.

If dategrep works on a normal file, it can do a binary search to find the first and last line to print pretty efficiently. dategrep can also read from stdin and compressed files, but as it can't do any seeking in those files, we have to parse every line until we find the first falling in our date range. But at least we don't have to wait for the pipe to be closed. As soon as we find the first date not in the range, dategrep terminates.

See UPGRADING if you used dategrep before. dategrep sees currently a lot of change, so this version might be less reliable as version 0.58. Please submit bug reports if anything unusual happens.

EXAMPLES

But just let me show you a few examples.

Without any parameter dategrep matches all lines from epoch to the time it started. In this case it's just a glorified cat that knows when to stop.

dategrep syslog

But things start to get interesting if you add the start and end options.

dategrep --start 12:00 --end 12:15 syslog

If you leave one out it again either defaults to epoch or now.

dategrep --end 12:15 syslog

Dategrep knows how to handle common time formats like apaches standard english format and rsyslog. If you need to handle a new format, you can use --format:

dategrep --format "%b %d %H:%M:%S" syslog

If your like me, you often need to call dategrep from cron and need to get all lines from the last five minutes. So there's an easy shortcut for that.

dategrep --last-minutes 5 syslog

Pipes or zipped files can also be handled, but those will be slower to filter. It's often more efficient to just search on an unzipped file or redirect the lines from the pipe to file first. But nothing is stopping you to just call dategrep directly.

cat syslog | dategrep --end 12:15
dategrep --end 12:15 syslog.gz

OPTIONS

ENVIRONMENT

COMPRESSED FILES

dategrep has only minimal support for compressed files. If any file in ARGV has an extension like .z,.gz,.bz2,.bz, dategrep will call zcat or bzcat respectively and read from it like from stdin.

LIMITATION

dategrep expects the files to be sorted. If the timestamps are not ascending, dategrep might be exiting before the last line in its date range is printed.

Compressed files are just piped into dategrep via bzcat or zcat.

SEE ALSO

strptime(3)

INSTALLATION

It is possible to install this script via perl normal install routines.

perl Build.PL && ./Build && ./Build install

Or via CPAN:

cpan App::dategrep

UPGRADING

dategrep after version 0.58 uses a new library to parse dates. Most time conversion specifiers are compatible, but it's probably better to check the manual for valid specifiers. In addition the format for specifying date offsets has changed.

COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE

Copyright 2014 Mario Domgoergen <mario@domgoergen.com>

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.