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I have output from a specific command that can provide the number of times an application has been marked as 'used' on an OS X system. The command is mdls.

The output looks similar to the following (truncated)

...
kMDItemLastUsedDate            = 2016-03-15 18:45:00 +0000
kMDItemLogicalSize             = 47225668
kMDItemPhysicalSize            = 57065472
kMDItemUseCount                = 90
kMDItemUsedDates               = (
    "2016-02-02 06:00:00 +0000",
    "2016-02-03 06:00:00 +0000",
    "2016-02-04 06:00:00 +0000",
    "2016-02-05 06:00:00 +0000",
    "2016-02-09 06:00:00 +0000",
    "2016-02-10 06:00:00 +0000",
    "2016-02-11 06:00:00 +0000",
    "2016-02-12 06:00:00 +0000",
    "2016-02-13 06:00:00 +0000",
    "2016-02-14 06:00:00 +0000",
    "2016-02-15 06:00:00 +0000",
    "2016-02-16 06:00:00 +0000",
    "2016-02-17 06:00:00 +0000",
    "2016-02-18 06:00:00 +0000",
    "2016-02-19 06:00:00 +0000",
    "2016-02-20 06:00:00 +0000",
    "2016-02-21 06:00:00 +0000",
    "2016-02-22 06:00:00 +0000",
    "2016-02-23 06:00:00 +0000",
    "2016-02-24 06:00:00 +0000",
    "2016-02-25 06:00:00 +0000",
    "2016-02-26 06:00:00 +0000",
    "2016-02-27 06:00:00 +0000",
    "2016-03-02 06:00:00 +0000",
    "2016-03-05 06:00:00 +0000",
    "2016-03-07 06:00:00 +0000",
    "2016-03-09 06:00:00 +0000",
    "2016-03-10 06:00:00 +0000",
    "2016-03-11 06:00:00 +0000",
    "2016-03-12 06:00:00 +0000",
    "2016-03-13 06:00:00 +0000",
    "2016-03-15 05:00:00 +0000"
)
kMDItemVersion                 = "9.0.3"
...

Of this list of stuff, I really only want to view the specific entries related to kMDItemUsedDates. I don't know how many lines this entry may have on any given system, it could be 1 or it could be 32.

How would I process this output to be able to retrieve ONLY a count of the number of date-stamp entries pertaining to the kMDItemUsedDates array? It's important to note that date-stamps in and of themselves are not unique in this command output.

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2 Answers 2

Reset to default
2 
perl -nE '$c++ if m/^kMDItemUsedDates\s+=\s+\(/..m/^\)/; END { say $c - 2 }'

Match and increment a counter between the start and end lines then print that count, minus the included count for the first and last lines. Feed it a file, files, or standard input.

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1
  • Thanks! I was assuming that something like perl would have to have been used, but I'm not that experienced with it or regex to have thought this through. But this works great!
    – Andrew
    Mar 17, 2016 at 11:42
1

The follow can count choiced lines if output will piped through:

sed -n '/kMDItemUsedDates\s*= (/{:1;n;/)/!{p;b1;};}' | wc -l

variant 2:

sed '/kMDItemUsedDates\s*= (/,/)/!d;/[()]/d' | wc -l
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4
  • I ran both of these and neither of them worked as expected :(
    – Andrew
    Mar 17, 2016 at 11:41
  • @Andrew what do it produced without | wc -l ?
    – Costas
    Mar 17, 2016 at 15:27
  • sed: 1: "/kMDItemUsedDates\s*= ( ...": unexpected EOF (pending }'s)
    – Andrew
    Mar 21, 2016 at 19:09
  • @Andrew try to put ( and ) inside [] : [(]
    – Costas
    Mar 22, 2016 at 18:31

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