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linuxbashawkgreptail

How to "filter" a tail output throug awk and grep?


On a special console I like to filter some informations from /var/log/syslog. That was not really tricky:

tail -f /var/log/syslog | awk '{print $2,$1,$9,$3,"\033[1;36m"$17 "\033[0m","\033[1;33m"$23 "\033[0m","\033[1;36m"$19 "\033[0m","\033[1;33m"$24 "\033[0m","\033[1;38m"$26"\033[0m","\033[1;32m"$13"\033[0m","\033[1;31m"$20 "\033[0m";}'

But now I want to pipe this through grep for a special field. Just adding a "| grep Fieldname" does not work, even not grep first, awk later (which would make more sense).

Could you please give me a tip?


Solution

  • Don't use grep, do the pattern match in awk.

    tail -f /var/log/syslog | awk '/Fieldname/ {print $2,$1,$9,$3,"\033[1;36m"$17 "\033[0m","\033[1;33m"$23 "\033[0m","\033[1;36m"$19 "\033[0m","\033[1;33m"$24 "\033[0m","\033[1;38m"$26"\033[0m","\033[1;32m"$13"\033[0m","\033[1;31m"$20 "\033[0m";}'
    

    If you really need to use grep, you can use the --line-buffered option so it doesn't buffer the output.

    tail -f /var/log/syslog | grep --line-buffered Fieldname | awk '{print $2,$1,$9,$3,"\033[1;36m"$17 "\033[0m","\033[1;33m"$23 "\033[0m","\033[1;36m"$19 "\033[0m","\033[1;33m"$24 "\033[0m","\033[1;38m"$26"\033[0m","\033[1;32m"$13"\033[0m","\033[1;31m"$20 "\033[0m";}'
    

    If you want to grep the output of awk, you should use fflush() after printing each line to flush the buffer immediately.

    tail -f /var/log/syslog | awk '{print $2,$1,$9,$3,"\033[1;36m"$17 "\033[0m","\033[1;33m"$23 "\033[0m","\033[1;36m"$19 "\033[0m","\033[1;33m"$24 "\033[0m","\033[1;38m"$26"\033[0m","\033[1;32m"$13"\033[0m","\033[1;31m"$20 "\033[0m"; fflush();}' | grep Fieldname