Regular Expressions and awk

[jimmy80]

I'm having a slight problem trying to extract a date field from a text file - any hope someone could help me out!?
I have a input file from which I am trying to extract only the date field from each line - the problem is the date field is not always in the same column - sometimes it is in the thired and other times it is in the fourth column - is there a way I can use a regular expression to extract only the date field using awk? The date field is in the format yyyy-mm-dd

Thanks for your help!
Jimmy

 

[aigles]

Hi,
Try this :

{
if ($3 ~ /^[0-9]{4}-[0-9]{2}-[0-9]{2}$/)
print $3
else
print $4
}


Jean Pierre.