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Mastering Linux Shell Scripting

You're reading from   Mastering Linux Shell Scripting Master the complexities of Bash shell scripting and unlock the power of shell for your enterprise

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Product type Paperback
Published in Dec 2015
Publisher
ISBN-13 9781784396978
Length 198 pages
Edition 1st Edition
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Author (1):
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Andrew Mallett Andrew Mallett
Author Profile Icon Andrew Mallett
Andrew Mallett
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Table of Contents (16) Chapters Close

Preface 1. What and Why of Scripting with Bash FREE CHAPTER 2. Creating Interactive Scripts 3. Conditions Attached 4. Creating Code Snippets 5. Alternative Syntax 6. Iterating with Loops 7. Creating Building Blocks with Functions 8. Introducing sed 9. Automating Apache Virtual Hosts 10. Awk Fundamentals 11. Summarizing Logs with Awk 12. A Better lastlog with Awk 13. Using Perl as a Bash Scripting Alternative 14. Using Python as a Bash Scripting Alternative Index

Chapter 12. A Better lastlog with Awk

We have already seen in Chapter 11, Summarizing Logs with Awk, how we can create complex reports from large amounts of data mined from purely text files. Similarly, we can create extensive reports using the output from standard command-line tools, such as the lastlog tool. In itself lastlog can report the last login time for all users. Often though, we may wish to filter the output from lastlog. Perhaps you need to exclude the user accounts that have never been used to login to the system. It may also be irrelevant to report on root, as the account may be predominately used for sudo only and not used to record regularly for standard logins.

In working through this chapter, we will work both with lastlog and formatting of XML data. As this is the last chapter in which we investigate awk, we will configure record separators. We have already seen the use of field separators in awk but we can change the default record separator from a newline to...

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