another FS question

[poask]

Hi,

I'm trying to use awk for the first time to do some calculations on some log files with non-standard timestamps, like these:

14:12:25.612
14:14:18.272
14:17:54.491

The first thing I want is to split each of the values for hours, minutes, seconds, milliseconds but I can't find a separator field that works. (Also there is more info on the same lines as the timestamps that I want to extract.)

I need to be able to specify a space, colon, and period as separators.

I tried

awk 'BEGIN {FS = ".: "}; {print $1":"$2":"$3"."$4}' 2.txt

but as soon as the period is not the only character in the FS field it is treated as a wildcard match in a regular expression.

I tried

awk 'BEGIN {FS = "\.: "}; {print $1":"$2":"$3"."$4}' 2.txt

but the following warning appears and it doesn't work again

awk: cmd. line:1: warning: escape sequence `\.' treated as
plain `.'

It must be something very simple and basic that I'm missing but it's very frustrating...

Anyone have a suggestion?

Many thanks,

Cheers

 

[PHV]

What about this ?
FS = "[.: ]+"

Hope This Helps, PH.
FAQ219-2884
FAQ181-2886

 

[poask]

That did it!

Thanks