Prepend command output lines with date/time stamps
Wednesday Jan 09, 2008
From time to time, I'd like to know at which point in time a server is powered off or loses its network connection when powering down. Or I'd like to know when certain things happened to a system (e.g. during problem analysis).
I found a method which can be used for any command that outputs data in intervals, using nawk. Here's a sample for ping -s:
ping -s ${HOST} |
nawk '{"date \"+%d.%m.%Y %H:%M:%S\":"|getline date;
close("date \"+%d.%m.%Y %H:%M:%S\":");
printf ("%s %s\n", date, $0)}'
or, in U.S. notation:
ping -s ${HOST} |
nawk '{"date \"+%m/%d/%Y %H:%M:%S\":"|getline date;
close("date \"+%m/%d/%Y %H:%M:%S\":");
printf ("%s %s\n", date, $0)}'
A sample output line looks as follows:
09.01.2008 16:08:24: 64 bytes from p2x (192.168.0.10): icmp_seq=0. time=0.734 ms 09.01.2008 16:08:25: 64 bytes from p2x (192.168.0.10): icmp_seq=1. time=0.357 ms 09.01.2008 16:08:26: 64 bytes from p2x (192.168.0.10): icmp_seq=2. time=0.563 ms
The important thing is to use the same date commands before the pipe and in the close() section of nawk.
By replacing the ping -s ${HOST} command with any other command that prints output to the terminal in intervals (e.g. iostat 2 or vmstat 5), you can use any other command and prepend each output line with corresponding date/time strings. You can then use the output to create charts in OpenOffice Calc or gnuplot.
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Thanks for the tip, Bernd.
I added a twist to it...