A Curious Programmer

I’ve spoken about processing logfiles with perl previously. Occasionally though, I still reach for sed.

Say I have a logfile that looks like this:

[ <timestamp> ] : somefunc()
[ <timestamp> ] : interesting line 1
[ <timestamp> ] : interesting line 2
... 1000s of lines
[ <timestamp> ] : somefunc()
[ <timestamp> ] : interesting line 1
[ <timestamp> ] : interesting line 2
... 1000s of lines

Picking out lines following a pattern is easy with sed – p prints the current match and n takes the next line.

$ < log.txt sed -n '/somefunc()/ {p;n;p;n;p}'
[ <timestamp> ] : somefunc()
[ <timestamp> ] : interesting line 1
[ <timestamp> ] : interesting line 2
[ <timestamp> ] : somefunc()
[ <timestamp> ] : interesting line 1
[ <timestamp> ] : interesting line 2

My first attempt to replace that with perl looks a bit ugly

< log.txt \
perl -ne 'if (/somefunc\(\)/) {print; print scalar(<>) for (1..2)}'

I’m not that happy with the module I came up with to hide the messiness either.

package Logfiles;

require Exporter;
our @ISA = qw(Exporter);
our @EXPORT_OK = qw(process);

use Carp;

sub process (&$;$)
{
    my ($sub, $regex, $lines) = @_;
    $lines ||= 0;
    return unless /$regex/;
    if (! $lines) {
        $sub->($_);
    } else {
        croak "process() arg 3 not ref ARRAY" unless ref($lines) eq 'ARRAY';
        my $line = 0;
        my @lines = @$lines;
        while (1) {
            if ($lines[0] == $line) {
                $sub->($_);
                shift @lines;
            }
            ++$line;
            last if ($line > $lines[0] or (not @lines));
            $_ = <>;
        }
    }
}

1;

But at least my typical spelunking looks a little cleaner now.

< log.txt perl -MLogfiles=process -ne \
    'process { print } qr/somefunc\(\)/, [0..2]'

Any suggestions on how to improve this (without reverting to sed)?

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