[X-Unix] Question about grep

[Brent Baisley]

My first question is why would you want to keep years worth of backup 
logs?

Grep doesn't know about data types, so you really can't easily use grep 
to determine a date range. What you could do is just grep the end of 
the log since Retrospect writes to the end of the log. Something like:
tail -500 logfile | grep -v Successful

That will only process the last 500 lines of the file.

Long term you should set Retrospect to keep the log file small. If you 
need to keep a history, cycle out the log like most Unix logs are done. 
Your own computer does this everyday with various other logs. Import 
the log into Filemaker or MySQL to keep a long history and easy 
searching.

On Mar 16, 2004, at 7:02 PM, Our Pal Al wrote:

> So in a file with lots of lines like this -
>
> 3/15/2004    5:58 PM    Drogo-OS X (21.177)    Macintosh HD    -24001
> user canceled    0:34:00    129.85.21.177
>
> How can I formulate grep to grab on the mm/dd/yyyy field and pull out 
> "any
> lines where the date is no older than 7 days ago"?
>
-- 
Brent Baisley
Systems Architect
Landover Associates, Inc.
Search & Advisory Services for Advanced Technology Environments
p: 212.759.6400/800.759.0577