Problem Piping iostat -c to awk!

[Paul Chvostek]

On Thu, Jul 14, 2005 at 11:43:39PM -0400, Hakim Singhji wrote:
> 
> | iostat -c 300 1 | awk '!/[a-zA-Z]|^$/ {print $1}'
> 
> This doesn't seem to work for me... awk tells me:
> 
> awk syntax error at source line 1
> 	***
> /[a: Event not found.

That's because you're using tcsh, and the exlcamation point is being
interpreted as part of a shell history reference.  You can turn this
into a shell *script*, or just run it in bash or /bin/sh.  Or if you
absolutely must run it in csh/tcsh, escape the ! with a \ (yes, even
inside single quotes).

> Not sure how to allow awk to delete two top rows of iostat... other that
> the grep option -v. Does not seem to be working in awk.

You could try something like:

 iostat -c 300 | awk 'BEGIN {getline;getline;} $1~/^[0-9]+$/ {print $1}'

or for something even lighter-weight:

 iostat -c 300 | sed -Ene 's/^ +//;s/ .*//;/^[0-9]+$/p'


-- 
  Paul Chvostek                                             <paul at it.ca>
  it.canada                                            http://www.it.ca/