grep between date ranges in a log

Question

I am trying to grep all the lines between 2 date ranges , where the dates are formatted like this : date_time.strftime("%Y%m%d%H%M") so say between [201211150821 - 201211150824]

I am trying to write a script which involves looking for lines between these dates:

cat <somepattern>*.log | **grep [201211150821 -  201211150824]** 

I am trying to find out if something exists in unix where I can look for a range in date.

I can convert dates in logs to (since epoch) and then use regular grep with [time1 - time2] , but that means reading each line , extracting the time value and then converting it etc .

May be something simple already exist , so that I can specify date/timestamp ranges the way I can provide a numeric range to grep ?

Thanks!

P.S: Also I can pass in the pattern something like 2012111511(27|28|29|[3-5][0-9]) , but thats specific to ranges I want and its tedious to try out for different dates each time and gets trickier doing it at runtime.

Answer 1

Use awk. Assuming the first token in the line is the timestamp:

awk '
BEGIN { first=ARGV[1]; last=ARGV[2]; }
$1 > first && $1 < last { print; }
' 201211150821 201211150824

Answer 2

A Perl solution:

perl -wne 'print if m/(?<!\d)(20\d{8})(?!\d)/
                      && $1 >= 201211150821 && $1 <= 201211150824'

(It finds the first ten-digit integer that starts with 20, and prints the line if that integer is within your range of interest. If it doesn't find any such integer, it skips the line. You can tweak the regex to be more restrictive about valid months and hours and so on.)