bash awk filter value between values

Question

Morning all,

I'm not very familiar with awk or filtering out values from a particular file.

The particular value i would like to extract from the file between "\n"

\nGenerated password: password\n

Is there a site i could potentially have a look at to help with this?

I managed to extract the information i need but having a bit of a difficult time to remove \n from the beginning and end of the line.

What i attempted: awk -F'\n' 'print $1'

Snippet of the output:

time="2023-01-23T18:40:06+02:00" level=info msg="Browser will open URL in 5 seconds"
time="2023-01-23T18:40:06+02:00" level=info msg="message"
time="2023-01-23T18:40:06+02:00" level=info msg="Open this link manually in a browser tab if it does not open."
time="2023-01-23T18:40:18+02:00" level=info msg="File encrypted \"file.txt\" in file.zip.\nGenerated password: mypassword\n"

Assuming there's no spaces in the password and `\n` is actually newline: `awk '/^Generated password: / { print $NF }'` — konsolebox, Jan 24 '23 at 07:21
the exact line is printed in the file as "\nGenerated password: mypassword\n" I managed to get to the point using awk to only print out "\nGenerated password: mypassword\n" but would be nice to remove "\n" from the beginning and end of the output — Hein, Jan 24 '23 at 07:32
Maybe show an actual and literal snippet of lines containing it. — konsolebox, Jan 24 '23 at 07:35
time="2023-01-23T18:40:06+02:00" level=info msg="Browser will open URL in 5 seconds" time="2023-01-23T18:40:06+02:00" level=info msg="message" time="2023-01-23T18:40:06+02:00" level=info msg="Open this link manually in a browser tab if it does not open." time="2023-01-23T18:40:18+02:00" level=info msg="File encrypted \"file.txt\" in file.zip.\nGenerated password: mypassword\n" — Hein, Jan 24 '23 at 07:43
Add this to your original post, click [edit](https://stackoverflow.com/posts/75218415/edit) — Gilles Quénot, Jan 24 '23 at 07:44
A great introduction to `awk` and `sed` are the one-liners explained. You can find them [here (awk)](http://www.catonmat.net/blog/awk-one-liners-explained-part-one/) and [here (sed)](http://www.catonmat.net/blog/sed-one-liners-explained-part-one/). After that, you have enough basic knowledge to read the POSIX and GNU pages that explain you the full language. — kvantour, Jan 24 '23 at 08:02
I'm putting my answer here b/c it might be useful to you: I'd use **GNU grep** if available, with perl lookbehind and lookahead patterns: `grep -Po '(?<=\\nGenerated password: ).*(?=\\n"$)'` You can adjust the patterns if necessary. For a literal backslash, escape with a second backslash. Note: Given that the output appears to be escaped/quoted (ie. `\n` and `\"`), you may need to handle the possibility of the password itself being escaped. — dan, Jan 24 '23 at 10:36
I don't understand the `awk` program you posted, but: A field separator of a newline (without change of the record separator) would mean that each line is considered as a single field, and `print $1` would therefore simply print out the whole line. — user1934428, Jan 24 '23 at 10:39

Gilles Quénot · Answer 1 · 2023-01-24T07:43:33.657

1

$ cat file
foo
Generated password: password
bar

$ awk '/^Generated password:/{printf "%s", $0}' file
-------8<------------------
Generated password: password

or to get only the value:

$ awk '/^Generated password:/{printf "%s", $NF}' file
-------8<------------------
password

edited Jan 24 '23 at 07:43

answered Jan 24 '23 at 07:21

Gilles Quénot

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What are the `-------8<------------------` lines in the output? – Ed Morton Jan 24 '23 at 13:11
1

An arbitrary separator from command and output – Gilles Quénot Jan 25 '23 at 06:25
1

Ah, I see, thanks. I thought the `8<` lining up under the `/^` from the regexp and `------------------` being the same length as `Generated password` had meaning and just couldn't figure it out :-). – Ed Morton Jan 25 '23 at 12:34

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Jan 24 '23 at 10:09

0

Using sed:

sed -n '/Generated password: / { s/\\n\".*//; s/.*\\n//; p }' file

answered Jan 24 '23 at 10:09

konsolebox

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bash awk filter value between values

2 Answers2