I need to egrep A records from a dns zone file...  but there could be any number of spaces and/or tabs between the "IN" and the "A" on a line.

I've googled and tried various suggestions but am getting nowhere...

all tips and hints gratefully received

ian

iandiddamsorg@googlemail.com wrote:
> I've googled and tried various suggestions but am getting nowhere...

egrep 'IN[	 ]+A' dns.zone, where '	 ' is a control-V<tab>
followed by a space?  That doesn't work for you?

-- 
Brandon Hume    - hume -> BOFH.Ca, http://WWW.BOFH.Ca/

hume.spamfilter@bofh.ca wrote:
> iandiddamsorg@googlemail.com wrote:
>> I've googled and tried various suggestions but am getting nowhere...
> 
> egrep 'IN[       ]+A' dns.zone, where '  ' is a control-V<tab>
> followed by a space?  That doesn't work for you?

I'd do this

egrep "IN[[:space:]]A" dns.zone

not all egreps support it, but at least you're not dealing with invisible 
characters inside commands. [:space:] is a magic value that matches spaces 
and/or tabs or any combination. you'd have to lookup how it's defined 
though.

thanks guys...  unfortunately neither suggestion works for me.

cheers anyway!

ian

iandiddamsorg@googlemail.com wrote:
> thanks guys...  unfortunately neither suggestion works for me.

Then I'm not sure anyone can help you without a real example from the
zone file, because there's something weird going on.

You might try using perl.

-- 
Brandon Hume    - hume -> BOFH.Ca, http://WWW.BOFH.Ca/

On Monday, July 2, 2012 1:55:20 PM UTC+1, (unknown) wrote:

> Then I'm not sure anyone can help you without a real example from the
> zone file, because there's something weird going on.

having done some more tests I totally concur.  If I create a seperate text file with

a line 

fred<space>IN<spaces>A<spaces>1.2.3.4

the above works fine - just not with the current zone files..

cheers for your time

Ian

On 07/ 2/12 01:55 PM, hume.spamfilter@bofh.ca wrote:
> iandiddamsorg@googlemail.com wrote:
>> thanks guys...  unfortunately neither suggestion works for me.
>
> Then I'm not sure anyone can help you without a real example from the
> zone file, because there's something weird going on.
>
> You might try using perl.
>

Or nawk


-- 
Bruce Porter
"The internet is a huge and diverse community but mainly friendly"
http://blog.maui.co.uk/index.php/ytc/
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iandiddamsorg@googlemail.com writes:
> thanks guys...  unfortunately neither suggestion works for me.

Maybe "cat -v" would reveal separators other than space and tab?
Are you sure your command line quoted search string contained a real TAB
character?
 -WBE

On 2012-06-29, iandiddamsorg@googlemail.com <iandiddamsorg@googlemail.com> wrote:
> I need to egrep A records from a dns zone file...  but there could be
> any number of spaces and/or tabs between the "IN" and the "A" on a line.

This can be done using egrep (see the other follow-ups) or by Perl which
also shipped with Solaris and which provides a more convenient syntax for
regular expressions with tons of extra features (see "perldoc perlre"
for a summary). If you want to extract just the A-records (and no AAAA
records), I suggest to use following line

   perl -ne 'print if /\bIN\s+A\b/' zone

Option "-n" is similar to "-n" of sed (implicit loop over all input
lines but without an implicit print) and "-e" tells that the following
argument is the actual Perl script. The statement causes all input lines
to be printed that match the given regular expression:

   \b   word boundary (you won't match WIN here)
   \s   space character including space, tabs etc. but no newline
   \s+  at least one space character

Andreas.