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Week 1B - Essential Grep


Essential Grep

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A gentle introduction to searching through files and logs

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Question 1: using grep

Grep takes a minimum of 2 parameters. The first parameter is what you are looking for, and the second parameter is the file you are looking through. So to find all the lines containing "pendance" in /usr/share/dict/words you could say:

grep "pendanced" /usr/share/dict/words

Adapt this example to find all the words in /usr/share/dict/words and find the first word that contains the three letter sequence wpa
wpa word:

Tests - not attempted
Dictionary search UNTESTED

Question 2: count with grep

You can pass the output of grep directly into another command if you want to. This could allow you to nest searches (e.g. find all the words containing "wta" which end in "ing") or perform other sorts of processing. This is called piping, and the producer of the code goes on the left of the pipe character and the processing command goes to the right. The pipe character is often in the bottom right of the keyboard, and look like "|" (do not confuse it with the colon ":");

The wc command when given the option "-l" (minus and the letter L in lower case) counts how many lines it has been given. So

grep "danced" /usr/share/dict/words | wc -l
finds all lines containing the string "danced" and gives it to wc for counting.

Use grep piped through wc on file /usr/share/dict/words to find the number of words that contain the letter x.
ber words:

Tests - not attempted
x word count UNTESTED

Question 3: count with grep and save

You can save the output of a command to a file by ending the line with ">filename". So to save the number of lines to a file called "gordon" which contain "danced" in the dictionary you can do:

grep "danced" /usr/share/dict/words | wc -l > gordon
You can see file you have created using "ls" (a bit like "dir") and see the contents of a file using "cat" (e.g. cat gordon).

Use grep piped through wc on file /usr/share/dict/words to find the number of words that contain the letter x and save that answer to a file called "q1".

Tests - not attempted
x word count to file UNTESTED

Question 4: negative grep

The grep command can take various options or flags. These are specified at the start of the command using a "-" sign. One useful flag is the "negation" search, which looks for lines which do not match. This flag is "-v". So to look for how many words DO NOT have "danced" in them, and save that to a file stuff, you could do

grep -v "danced" /usr/share/dict/words | wc -l > stuff

Use grep to find all lines in /etc/passwd that do not have nologin one the line. Send the output to file nolog

Tests - not attempted
not nologin UNTESTED

Question 5: Download a log

Use the command wget to download one of my server's log files. You need to do:

wget http://linuxzoo.net/data/web.log -O log
This downloads one of my weblogs and saves it into a file called "log".

Tests - not attempted
Downloaded ok UNTESTED

Question 6: Any 404

Look for file not found errors in this weblog. This is error 404. Although not a perfect method, you can do this by searching for " 404 " in the log. The spaces are important, otherwise a search for "404" would match "404hello" etc.

Once found save all of those to a file called "notfound".

Tests - not attempted
Notfound lines UNTESTED

Question 7: The IP numbers

Process the "notfound" file and save a list of only the IP numbers of each log entry. This can be done using

cut -f1 -d" " filename
This gives the first "field" of the file "filename", where fields are delimited using the space " " character. Save that info to a file called "ip".

Tests - not attempted
Just IPs UNTESTED

Question 8: Duplicates

If you "cat ip" you will see that there are many duplicate IPs shown. The "sort -u filename" command will sort uniquely that file and remove duplicates. It also sorts the entry alpha numerically. What is the last IP printed if this uniqueness processing is applied to the ip file?
Last Unique IP:

Tests - not attempted
find .conf UNTESTED

Question 9: How many times

How many times does the above IP exist in the full log file "log"?
Count of Last Unique IP:

Tests - not attempted
find new files UNTESTED


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