awk to search adn delete char

[simpson]

I would like to use an awk statement to do the follow. Search for a specific line in a file that contains a word and print out the 5th item.

Easy enough. awk '/foo/ {print $5}' /tmp/log

what I would like to do is take it one step further and truncate the result down because the data is wrapped in brackets. example.
# awk '/foo/ {print $5}' /tmp/log
returns: [255.255.255.0]

I would i like to strip off the leading and trailing bracket.

Any assistance woudld be appreciated.
thanks

 

[Annihilannic]

This should do the trick:

awk '/foo/ {gsub("[][]","",$5);print $5}' /tmp/log

You may need to use nawk depending on your OS. nawk on Solaris doesn't seem to like the above character class syntax, in which case try:

nawk '/foo/ {gsub("[[]","",$5);gsub("[]]","",$5);print $5}' /tmp/log

Annihilannic.

 

[simpson]

awk '/foo/ {gsub("[][]","",$5);print $5}' /tmp/log

FANTASTIC.
Thank you very much.