In bash search text in a file on a specific date range & output results

I've been thinking about this for a bit now considering how to do this in an efficient way.

Using bash scripting... I suppose you could... if you have unlimited time + budget...

Or you can use PERL + be done in a few minutes.

Consider this script, which is one implementation of paragrep (paragraph based grep tool) which outputs paragraphs on any match in the paragraph.

Note: This is a hastily constructed bit of code is likely buggy.

I've attached the paragrep script.

Usage example...

paragrep "installdate.+201[89]" machineinfo.txt

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Scoping of data returned is to look at installdate along with some regular expression to correctly express the date range desired.

So "installdate.+201[89]" means look for installdate in a paragraph followed by any characters (.+) for any 2018-2019 dates (201[89]).

For finer grain date matching, use grep-ish syntax, so 20182[23] will return Feb + March 2018 dates, etc...

This allows for files to be scanned only once, rather than multiple times... in case you have big files or complex date ranges to scan.

Note: Exercise of converting paragrep from PERL to BASH is left to you. Certainly be a good learning experience.
paragrep.pl

Thanks for your reply David. Ive never used paragrep / perl but sounds like that a tool worth exploring so ill look into it. Im running bash on a Windows 10 client computer and ideally was hoping to not need to use another tool instead of bash. i guess paragrep is based on perl

Sounds like what im trying to do may be more tricky than what i imagined

You're welcome!

Hope the script helps you!

Yep, I provide a PERL script because most machines have PERL.

As I said, likely this can be done in BASH + rather than a few minutes to produce a PERL script... I'd have had to work days to get a BASH script working to implement the same logic.

Call me lazy or efficient, PERL seemed a better fit for this particular task.

this will display the Displayname and installtime sorted as required

sed -ne '/DisplayName/ h ; /InstallDate = "20190\(40[1-9]\|50\|51[123]\)/ { G ; s/\n/ /g ; p }' /path/to/machineinfo.txt | sort -k3

you obviously can change the format as you see fit

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side notes :
- awk or perl should allow better date handling than messing with eregs
- the windows os probably provides other means to retrieve that same information