Note: The file format here is the same as in my earlier article Do it better with awk 1.

Today I was able to meet Bryan of Guru Labs.  During our conversation he posed the following question. “Find the 3rd field in a file consisting of space operated fields, the first being an ip address, with in the range 192.168.1-2.1-255. There maybe lines in the file containing invalid ip addresses.”

I used grep to find the lines and then used awk to find the field. For example:

$ egrep '^192\.168\.[1-2]\.([0-9]|[1-9][0-9]|1[0-9]{2}|2[0-4][0-9]|2[0-5]{2})' access_log | awk '{print $(NF-1)}'
200
304
304
...

He pointed out that, while this works, there is no reason to invoke grep. He is certainly correct, there is no reason to invoke grep. Indeed, awk is all powerful! The default usage of awk is:

awk 'pattern { command }'

In its most common and simple usage, to print a field deliminated by spaces:

awk '{print $3}'

You are specifying no pattern, which matches every line.  When solving the problem posed by Bryan, simply specify the pattern and eliminate grep from the pipe line.  Here is the previous pipeline, using only awk:

$ awk '/^192\.168\.[1-2]\.([0-9]|[1-9][0-9]|1[0-9]{2}|2[0-4][0-9]|2[0-5]{2})/ {print $(NF-1)}' access_log
200
304
304
...

Awk has some extremely powerful selecting operators. Here I am using the ~ operator to match the third field from the right (resource), to ^/man, and printing the matched field:

$ awk '$(NF-3) ~ /^\/man/ {print $(NF-3)}' access_log
/man/cmd/info
/man/cmd/Mail
/man/s/Z
/man/cmd/mv
...

This invocation uses the !~ operator, to match lines where the resource does not match the pattern ^/man:

$ awk '$(NF-3) !~ /^\/man/ {print $(NF-3)}' access_log
/feed/
/feed
/robots.txt
/10-linux-commands-youve-never-used.html
...

Here I am selecting lines where the response code $(NF-1) is greater than 200, but less than 400 and then printing the resource and response code. I use awk’s boolean “and” operator && to perform this operation:

 $ awk '$(NF-1) >= 200 && $(NF-1) <= 399 {print $(NF-3), $(NF-1)}' access_log
/man/cmd/info 200
/feed/ 304
/feed 304
...

The following example uses the boolean “or” operator || to print lines where there resource matches ^/feed or ^/sitemap.

$ awk '$(NF-3) ~ /^\/feed/ || $(NF-3) ~ /^\/sitemap/ {print $0}' access_log
192.168.1.2 - - [01/Jan/2008:00:00:31 -0600] "GET /feed/ HTTP/1.1" 304 -
192.168.1.3 - - [01/Jan/2008:00:01:09 -0600] "GET /feed HTTP/1.1" 304 -
...

• We’re a little late breaking on this, but regret can stick around. If you’ve got something from 2007 you wish you could take back, you’re not alone. Wired Magazine’s foot-in-mouth awards for the year gone by.
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