match


LibreOffice Calc: Finding duplicate / common entries between two columns

This video demonstrates how to find all matching values between two columns in LibreOffice Calc. Precisely, in this video, we fill in columns A and B with random integer values between the numbers 1 and 100 (inclusive). The formula to generate the random values was the following:

=RANDBETWEEN(1;100)

After we filled in columns A and B with random values, we used the following formula in each cell of column C to find all common values between the first two columns:

=IF(ISERROR(MATCH(B1;A:A;0));"";B1)

LibreOffice Cal commands used in this video

  • RANDBETWEEN(Bottom; Top) – Returns an integer random number in a specified range.
  • IF(Test; ThenValue; OtherwiseValue) – Specifies a logical test to be performed.
  • ISERROR(Value) – Tests for error conditions, including the #N/A error value, and returns TRUE or FALSE.
  • MATCH(SearchCriterion; LookupArray; Type) – Returns the relative position of an item in an array that matches a specified value. The function returns the position of the value found in the lookup_array as a number.


Bash: Extract data from files both filtering filename, the path and doing internal processing

The following code will find all files that match the pattern 2016_*_*.log (all the log files for the year 2016).

To avoid finding log files from other services than the Web API service, we filter only the files that their path contains the folder webapi. Specifically, we used "/ServerLogs/*/webapi/*" with the following command to match all files that are under the folder /ServerLogs/ and somewhere in the path there is another folder named webapi, we do that to match files that are like /ServerLogs/Production/01/webapi/* only. The way we coded our regular expression, it will not match if there is a folder called webapi directly under the /ServerLogs/ (e.g. /ServerLogs/webapi/*).

For each result, we execute an awk script that will split the lines using the comma (FS=",";) character, then check if the line contains exactly 4 tokens (if (NF == 4) {). Later, we get the 4th token and check if it contains the substring "MASTER=" (if (match($4,"MASTER=")) {), if it does contain it we split it using the space character and assign the result to the variable named tokens. From tokens, we get the first token and use substr to remove the first character. Finally, we use the formatted result to create an array where the keys are the values we just created and it is used as a hashmap to keep record of all unique strings. In the end clause, we print all the elements of our hash map.

Finally, we sort all the results from all the awk executions and remove duplicates using sort --unique.


find /ServerLogs/ \
    -iname "2016_*_*.log" \
    -ipath "/ServerLogs/*/webapi/*" \
    -exec awk '
        BEGIN {
            FS=",";
        }
        {
            if (NF == 4) {
                if (match($4,"MASTER=")) {
                    split($4, tokens, " ");
                    instances[substr(tokens[1], 2)];
                }
            }
        }
        END {
            for (element in instances) {
                print element;
            }
        }
    ' \
    '{}' \; | sort --unique;

Following is the same code in one line.

 find /ServerLogs/ -iname "2016_*_*.log" -ipath "/ServerLogs/*/webapi/*" -exec awk 'BEGIN {FS=",";} {if (NF == 4) {if (match($4,"MASTER=")){split($4, tokens, " "); instances[substr(tokens[1], 2)];}}} END {for (element in instances) {print element;}}' '{}' \; | sort --unique 

Another way

Another way to do similar functionality would be the following


find /ServerLogs/ \
    -iname "2016_*_*.log" \
    -ipath "/ServerLogs/*/webapi/*" \
    -exec sh -c '
        grep "MASTER=" -s "$0" | awk "BEGIN {FS=\",\";} NF==4" | cut -d "," -f4 | cut -c 3- | cut -d " " -f1 | sort --unique
    ' \
    '{}' \; | sort --unique;

What we changed is the -exec part. Instead of calling a awk script, we create a new sub-shell using sh -c, then we define the source to be executed inside the single codes and we pass as the first parameter of the shell the filename that matched.

Inside the shell, we find all lines that contain the string MASTER= using the grep command. Later we filter out all lines that do not have four columns when we tokenize using the comma character using awk. Then, we get the 4th column using cut and delimiter the comma. We remove the first two characters of the input string using cut -c 3- and later we get only the first column by reusing cut and changing the delimiter to be the space character. With those results we perform a sort that eliminates duplicates and we pass the results to the parent process to perform other operations.

Following is the same code in one line


find /ServerLogs/ -iname "2016_*_*.log" -ipath "/ServerLogs/*/webapi/*" -exec sh -c 'grep "MASTER=" -s "$0" | awk "BEGIN {FS=\",\";} NF==4" | cut -d "," -f4 | cut -c 3- | cut -d " " -f1 | sort --unique' '{}' \; | sort --unique;