Using grep to get the next WORD after a match in each line

Question

I want to get the \"GET\" queries from my server logs.

For example, this is the server log

1.0.0.127.in-addr.arpa - - [10/Jun/2012          


        

Answer 1

It's often easier to use a pipeline rather than a single complex regular expression. This works on the data you provided:

fgrep GET /tmp/foo | 
    egrep -o 'GET (.*) HTTP' |
    sed -r 's/^GET \/(.+) HTTP/\1/'

This pipeline returns the following results:

hello
ss

There are certainly other ways to get the job done, but this patently works on the provided corpus.