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I have the following time formats in a text file

       `1` equals one second.

    `5|01` equals five minutes and one seconds.

   `13|01` equals thirteen minutes and one seconds.

`21|12|01` equals 21 hours, 12 minutes, and 1 seconds.

I need to egrep for any times over five minutes.
I'm using the following regex but it doesn't work because it excludes times such as 13|00.

'[[:space:]0-9][[:space:]0-9][[:space:]|][[:space:]0-9][[:space:]6-9][|][0-9][0-9]'

Here's an example:

 lite on       1

 lite on      01

 lite on    5|22

 lite on   23|14

 lite on 1|14|23

Ignoring the spaces (which you can fill in yourself later) and possible leading zeros (likewise), you're looking to match any of

[5-9]|[0-9]+

[1-9][0-9]|[0-9]+

[0-9]+|[0-9]+|[0-9]+

for times in the range

[5,10) minutes

[10,99) minutes

1+ hours

respectively.

So join those together in a match group (...|...) with sufficient anchoring at the beginning and end (so you don't match on 14|59 or 1|00|00).

This gives

grep -E 'on +([5-9]|[0-9]+|[1-9][0-9]|[0-9]+|[0-9]+|[0-9]+|[0-9]+) *$'

We can simplify a little, because the seconds are common to all three regexps:

grep -E 'on +([5-9]|[1-9][0-9]|[0-9]+|[0-9]+)|[0-9]+ *$'

This should work:

grep -E '( [0-9]{1,2}|[0-9]{1,2}|[0-9][1-9] )|( [0-9][0-9]|[0-9]{2,2} )|( [5-9]|[0-9][1-9] )|( [6-9]|[0-9][0-9] )' <file>

Basically you are creating 4 patterns encased in ()'s separated by |'s. the |'s act as or in the regex.

the {1,2} parts are 1-2 instances of preceding pattern so [0-9]{1,2} means 1-2 instances of 0-9

After which we create a basic test case for all your possible digit combinations's via the or syntax

Don't use grep. Regular expressions are for matching patterns, but they're really horrible for matching values. You can probably do it, but you're using a hammer as a screwdriver. Technically it works, but it's messy and inefficient.

So instead:

#!/usr/bin/env perl



use strict;

use warnings;



while (<DATA>) {

    my @numbers = m/(d+)/g;

    my $seconds = pop(@numbers);

    $seconds += ( pop(@numbers) // 0 ) * 60;  #second digit minutes -> seconds

    $seconds

        += ( pop(@numbers) // 0 ) * 60 * 60;  #third digit, hours  -> seconds;

    print if $seconds > 300;

}



__DATA__

 lite on       1

 lite on      01

 lite on    5|22

 lite on   23|14

 lite on 1|14|23

This prints:

 lite on    5|22

 lite on   23|14

 lite on 1|14|23

You can one-liner-ify this as:

perl -ne 'for ( m/(d+)/g ) { $t *= 60; $t += $_ }; print if $t > 300;'

For bonus points - this copes with fairly arbitrary validation criteria, without too much difficulty, and doesn't require anywhere near as much mucking around if you decide to grep for a different value one day.

But the above works by:

• use m/(d+)/g - as a g match, means it selects repeated instances of "one or more digits" into an array. (@numbers or just as a self contained iterator in the for loop in the second example).


• it converts that chain of digits to seconds by mutiplying up by 60. (This won't work so well if you ever add days to it!)


• And then tests that number for being greater than 300 - which is 5 minutes in seconds.