Save part of matching pattern to variable

Question

I want to extract a substring matching a pattern and save it to a file. An example string:

Apr 12 19:24:17 PC_NMG kernel: sd 11:0:0:0: [sdf] Attached SCSI removable disk

I want to extract the part between the brackets, in this case [sdf].

I tried to do something like grep -e '[$subtext]' to save the text in the brackets to a variable. Of course it doesn't work, but I am looking for a way similar to this. It would be very elegant to include a variable in a regex like this. What can I do best?

Thanks!

Answer 1

sed is greedy, so the sed answers will miss out some of the data if there are more [] pairs in your data. Use the grep+tr solution or you can use awk

$ cat file
[sss]Apr 12 19:24:17 PC_NMG kernel: sd 11:0:0:0: [sdf] Attached SCSI removable disk [tag] blah blah

$ awk -F"[" '{for(i=2;i<=NF;i++){if($i~/\]/){sub("].*","",$i)};print $i}}' file
sss
sdf
tag