Extract Only Lines Of 4 days using grep or awk

Question

Hello I have a text file with below entries

MySql-DataBase-2020-09-22_120712.zip
MySql-DataBase-2020-09-22_120947.zip
MySql-DataBase-2020-09-23_153159.zip
MySql-DataBase-2020-09-23_153434.zip
MySql-DataBase-2020-09-24_053634.zip
MySql-DataBase-2020-09-24_053910.zip
MySql-DataBase-2020-09-25_053255.zip
MySql-DataBase-2020-09-25_053530.zip
MySql-DataBase-2020-09-26_055307.zip
MySql-DataBase-2020-09-26_055542.zip
MySql-DataBase-2020-09-27_063328.zip
MySql-DataBase-2020-09-27_063603.zi
MySql-DataBase-2020-10-01_210715.zip
MySql-DataBase-2020-10-01_210950.zip
MySql-DataBase-2020-10-02_033726.zip
MySql-DataBase-2020-10-02_034001.zip
MySql-DataBase-2020-10-03_064238.zip
MySql-DataBase-2020-10-03_064513.zip
MySql-DataBase-2020-10-04_043117.zip
MySql-DataBase-2020-10-04_043353.zip
MySql-DataBase-2020-10-05_050735.zip
MySql-DataBase-2020-10-05_051010.zip
MySql-DataBase-2020-10-06_073457.zip
MySql-DataBase-2020-10-06_073733.zip
MySql-DataBase-2020-10-07_033928.zip
MySql-DataBase-2020-10-07_034204.zip
MySql-DataBase-2020-10-08_014822.zip
MySql-DataBase-2020-10-08_015059.zip
MySql-DataBase-2020-10-09_033301.zip
MySql-DataBase-2020-10-09_033537.zip

I want to select only files between [today's date -4days] & [to whichever old date]

I tried to search on something like this but couldn't find anything :(

Can anyone please help me with any grep, awk command or any small php or python script which can do this?

Does this answer your question? [Filter log file entries based on date range](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7706095/filter-log-file-entries-based-on-date-range) — Ravi Saroch, Oct 09 '20 at 09:10

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Oct 09 '20 at 09:14

The interesting thing about your entries that is a really good practice is to have a naming convention, and the best is that you use a YYYY-MM-DD date format. This format is interesting because you just have compare string values to get which one is newer. For exemple if you have '2020-10-25', it's greater than '2020-10-20' and it's also newer in time. So you can use a simple lexicographic comparison like that :

import datetime
from datetime import timedelta  

#the file in which are the entries 
filename = 'your_file' 

#creating a start date by takin current date and subtracting 4 days
startDate = (datetime.datetime.today() + timedelta(days=-4)).strftime('%Y-%m-%d') 

endDate = '2020-10-08' #whatever date you want

startFile = 'MySql-DataBase-' + startDate
endFile = 'MySql-DataBase-' + endDate

#open the file and get all entries
with open(filename) as f:
    content = f.readlines()
myFiles = [x.strip() for x in content]

# Adding all the file that name is between startFile and endFile
res = [file for  file in myFiles if startFile < file < endFile]

print(res)

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Oct 09 '20 at 12:44

Using awk:

$ awk '
BEGIN {
    cmd="date +\"%Y-%m-%d_%H%M%S\" -d \"-4 days\""  # get date 4 days ago
    if((cmd|getline dt)<=0)                         # if getline did not work
        exit                                        # exit
} 
$0<"MySql-DataBase-" dt' file                       # compare and conditionally output

Output:

MySql-DataBase-2020-09-22_120712.zip
...
MySql-DataBase-2020-10-05_050735.zip
MySql-DataBase-2020-10-05_051010.zip

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Oct 09 '20 at 13:01

0

If (and only if) the dates reflected in file names is reflected in actual file creation date.

You can better use find command.

find . -type f -name "*.zip" -ctime 4

answered Oct 09 '20 at 13:01

Dudi Boy

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Extract Only Lines Of 4 days using grep or awk

3 Answers3