Example—Processing praudit Output With a Script

Sometimes, you might want to manipulate output from the praudit command as lines of text. For example, you might want to select records that the auditreduce command cannot select. You can use a simple shell script to process the output of praudit. The following simple example script puts one audit record on one line, searches for a user-specified string, then returns the audit file to its original form. Specifically, the script does the following:

1. Marks the header tokens by prefixing them with Control-A

2. Combines all the audit tokens for one record onto one line while preserving the line breaks as Control-A

3. Runs the grep command

4. Restores the original newline breaks

#!/bin/sh
praudit | sed -e '1,2d' -e '$s/^file.*$//' -e 's/^header/^aheader/' \\
| tr '\\012\\001' '\\002\\012' \\
| grep "$1" \\
| tr '\\002' '\\012'

Note that the ^a in the script is Control-A, not the two characters ^ and a. The prefix distinguishes the header token from the string header that might appear as text.