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I am trying to parse a text file that is generated by an expec script that pulls down some information from a switch.

Here is a sample output:

192      0000.0000.0000        1/g23      Dynamic              
192      0000.0000.0000        ch1        Dynamic              
192      0000.0000.0000        ch1        Dynamic              
192      0000.0000.0000        ch1        Dynamic

The text file has a lot of other junk in it that I am not interested in. I only want the lines that contain the switch number and the port - "1/g23" in the example above.

I did a grep on the file to extract the lines that contain the pattern '/g' and it works great.

Now all I want are the two middle columns. I used awk to print the columns.

0000.0000.0000 1/g23

Now that that is done I want to get ride of the '.' sed worked okay for this

000000000000 1/g23

From here I want to convert only the first column to a MAC address format.

So this
000000000000 1/g23
Becomes this
00:00:00:00:00:00 1/g23

I was able to find a sed command that would accomplish this. But my problem is I only need it done on the first column. I am not quite sure how I can edit only the one column and not lose the association between the MAC and the port.

grep -e "/g" switch6output | awk '{print $2,$3}' | sed 's/\.//g' | sed 's/../&:/g;s/:$//'

I'm sure this is a really stupid way of doing it, but it was the best I could come up with. Is there a more reliable way I can accomplish what I need without losing the MAC and port association?

Thank you.

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2 Answers 2

Reset to default
6

Just use awk directly:

awk '/\/g/ {
        gsub(/\./, "", $2)
        gsub(/../, "&:", $2)
        sub(/:$/, "", $2) 
        print $2,$3
}'

With this solution you don't need grep nor sed.

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3
  • This is awesome! Worked perfectly. Thank you!!!! Sorry to ask another dumb question. does the second gsub with "&:" put the semi-colon in the correct place? I was just trying to figure out the purpose of the "&". and the last sub removes the trailing semi-colon that is left over?
    – bourne
    Commented Jul 26, 2012 at 2:25
  • 1
    @bourne you are right - see gnu.org/software/gawk/manual/html_node/String-Functions.html If the special character ‘&’ appears in replacement, it stands for the precise substring that was matched by regexp.
    – Ulrich Dangel
    Commented Jul 26, 2012 at 3:07
  • Thank you for the explanation. I am starting to understand it a little more. A friend of mine actually created a little script to test the use of the '&' and it is making it make more sense. Thanks again!
    – bourne
    Commented Jul 26, 2012 at 20:08
5

Only sed example:

sed -r '\=1/g23=!d;
        s/[^ ]* *//;
        s/ *[^ ]* *$//;
        s/(..)\.(..)/:\1:\2:/g;
        s/::/:/'

If your input contains tabs instead of spaces, you have to adjust the expressions.

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3
  • Wow this is great.Thank you very much for the response. I had a little bit of a harder time following this one so I think I might use the awk. But I am going to try and figure out how you did it using this sed expression! Thank you again
    – bourne
    Commented Jul 26, 2012 at 2:21
  • @bourne: Here is another one for you to work out :) ... The $x and $d are just to aviod some of the clutter in the regex; and it caters for any port/switch value. If they are hex digits, just change $d to suit... x='(..)'; d='[0-9]+'; sed -rn "/$d\/g$d/{ s/\S+\s+$x$x\.$x$x\.$x$x\s+($d\/g$d).*/\1:\2:\3:\4:\5:\6 \7/p }" file
    – Peter.O
    Commented Jul 26, 2012 at 5:45
  • @Peter.O Awesome thank you! I am learning a ton about how sed and awk work from this thread! I will work through both yours and choroba's suggestions so I can understand them better!
    – bourne
    Commented Jul 26, 2012 at 19:22

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