Bash & grep question

clsCorwin

So I have a bunch of data that looks like this:

Country: (Unknown Country?) (XX) City: (Unknown City?) IP: 112.78.119.61
Country: CHINA (CN) City: Beijing IP: 114.247.18.5
Country: HONG KONG (HK) City: Hong Kong IP: 115.126.5.104

And I want to arrange it nice and alphabetically by country.

So I tried this as a shot in the dark:

ALPHA="( a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z"
#grep in geoip_list for 'Country: [$x].*
for x in $ALPHA
do
  grep 'Country: [$x].*' geoip_list >> geo_alphabetical
done

but it didn't work. Can I do this, or do I just have to do individual greps for each letter?

ecco the dolphin

Hmmm... have you considered using sort as an alternative?

Edit:

e.g. sort geoip_list > geo_alphabetical

Alternatively, if you have lines other than country and only want the lines starting with Country:

grep '^Country: ' geoip_list | sort > geo_alphabetical

clsCorwin

I actually tried sort first, but since every line starts with Country: the sort does no good. If I could sort based on a specific field, that would work.

ecco the dolphin

clsCorwin wrote: »

I actually tried sort first, but since every line starts with Country: the sort does no good. If I could sort based on a specific field, that would work.

Could you double check, please? A quick test here shows that sort sorts by the entire line, as opposed to fields:

$ cat geoip_list 
Country: HONG KONG (HK) City: Hong Kong IP: 115.126.5.104
Country: CHINA (CN) City: Beijing IP: 114.247.18.5
Country: (Unknown Country?) (XX) City: (Unknown City?) IP: 112.78.119.61

$ sort geoip_list 
Country: (Unknown Country?) (XX) City: (Unknown City?) IP: 112.78.119.61
Country: CHINA (CN) City: Beijing IP: 114.247.18.5
Country: HONG KONG (HK) City: Hong Kong IP: 115.126.5.104

clsCorwin

hmm, maybe I just mistyped something last time causing it to not work.

Lets see how it pans out here in a few.

clsCorwin

Sorted good, now it just doesnt want to display right. Rather than getting:
Country: HONG KONG (HK) City: Hong Kong IP: 115.126.5.104

I have
Country:
HONG
KONG
(HK)
City:
...

argh

clsCorwin

Ok, so I have the geo_alphabetical file with all the data, which needs to get dumped into an html file.

right now, I have $HDR defined as my header for the html file, and $FTR likewise for the footer.

before, when I just dumped the data straight into the html after the lynx query for groip info, it came out as one solid line. Trying to cat or echo the file to the html file results in word by word messiness.

How should I do this?

clsCorwin

Nevermind, fixed it by appending to the file at the sort. You know, the way it should have been done the first time.