Using agrep to parse log files

How to use agrep, a windows based version of the linux command line grep tool

This example comes from finding lines related to a message in smartermail log files.

Lets assume we are trying to find an email and track the actions our mail server did for that email. First I am going to filter the logs for the 16/6/2009 and return only the lines for a particular domain.

To do this we copy the days log files into a /tmp directory and run the following:

This will give us every line in all the files in the tmp directory relating to domain.com. We can then sift through this manually to find a row relating to the mail we need.

One of these lines looks like this:

Notice the [xxxxx] reference number - this is carried through all logs for this particular email, so we can use thet to find all log entries about this mail:

this outputs all the lines with [25354] in them to the out.txt file