Problem Piping iostat -c to awk!

[Dan Nelson]

In the last episode (Jul 14), Hakim Singhji said:
> 
> | 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.
> 
> 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're probably running csh or tcsh, which try and interpret the !
character even in quotes.  It'll work in a script, but on the
commandline you'll need to change it to \! . Alternatively, you can
print only lines with leading spaces followed by a number with:

iostat -c 300 1 | gawk '/^ +[0-9]/ {print $1}'

-- 
	Dan Nelson
	dnelson at allantgroup.com