Using awk ranges to exclude data
So far in this book, we have predominately looked at including data with ranges either for sed or for awk. With both of these tools, we can negate the range so that we exclude the specified rows. This suits the need that we have been using the output from lastlog. This will print all the login data for all the users, including accounts that have never been logged in. These accounts that have never been logged in might be service accounts or for new users that have not logged into the system so far.
The lastlog command
If we look at the output from lastlog, when it is used without any options, we can begin to understand the issue. From the command line, we execute the command as a standard user. There is no requirement to run it as the root account. The command is shown in the following example:
$ lastlog
The partial output is shown within the following screenshot:
We can see, even from this limited output that we have a cluttered output due to the virtual noise...
