Extract text following a particular pattern

[brick79]

I have a text file that contains separate lines where this text will always appear, short_message=<some text>. The <some text> part could potentially be different on every line. What I'd like to do is extract the <some text> text and only that text from the file. I don't want the text after the comma following <some text>. I would simply like to extract and redirect this text to another file.

An example of the line is as follows:
..., short_message=<some text>, product_code=xxx_xxx_xxx_xxx_x, subscription_action=SYSTEM, MESSAGE_FORMAT_TYPE=TEXT}}}

I've tried sed, grep, even awk, but I'm no expert on these tools and simply cannot find a way to get only the text I'm looking for. Hoping someone can help.

[griswolf]

You need 'cut' (awk would be somewhat more efficient, but I always have to fiddle around to get an awk script working):

cat originalfile | grep 'short_message=' | cut -f2 -d '=' | cut -f1 -d ',' > short_message_file

If your file has some '=' before the part you need, then the first cut will be -fn for an appropriate value of n.

[cfajohnson]

sed '/short_message=/ s/.*short_message=\([^,]*\),.*/\1/'

[brick79]

Thanks so much for the help. These both seem to do the trick.

[JeoSaurus]

Awk would be great for this too, especially if the message is in the same 'field' every time.

For instance, in your example text, your 'short_message' is in the second field (after the first comma). Something like this would do the trick: awk -F, '/short_message/ {split ($2,A,"="); print A[2]}' In the example, we set the comma as the initial delimeter with the '-F' flag.
We grab the second field with '$2'.
Then we split that field at the '=' sign and print the second half, which gives us <some text>

I hope this helps! You've already got two good solutions here :) Enjoy!

-G