I like awk (In Solaris, I like nawk better than awk, though 😉 ).
Let’s see how we can deal with multiline records. Here’s an approach I use quite often (if you have a better idea, please tell me!).
Given the following output of:
$ su - demo -c "prctl -t privileged -n project.max-shm-memory -i project user.demo"
which is for example:
Sun Microsystems Inc. SunOS 5.10 Generic January 2005
project: 100: user.demo
NAME PRIVILEGE VALUE FLAG ACTION RECIPIENT
project.max-shm-memory
privileged 4.00GB - deny -
I would like to have just one line with the most important fields:
project.max-shm-memory 4.00GB deny
In order to get that, I search for the header line and print the interesting fields of the following lines:
$ su - demo -c "prctl -t privileged -n project.max-shm-memory -i project user.demo" | \
nawk '
{a++;if (a==-99){printf ("%s\t", $1)}}
/NAME/{a=-100}
/privileged/{printf ("%s\t%s\n", $2, $4)}'
By setting the counter a to -100 instead of a positive value, I do not have to initialize it in a BEGIN statement. For each line, I increase counter a. If it reaches -99 which is the next line after the line containing pattern NAME, I print the first field with just a tab but no newline. For the line that contains string privileged, I print column 2 and 4, plus the newline.
As the script does not select lines by just counting from the beginning, this is a very robust solution that works indepentendly of any “garbage” output caused by login scripts of the user I am using.
