I'd like help creating a batch file that will search a log file for certain sections of text and export them to a log file. example log file: blah blah blah Startingword This is the sentence I want to grab. Endingword blah blah blah output: This is the sentence I want to grab. So would want to be able to set the key starting and ending strings and then have it grab any information in the middle and output it to a file. Thanks!

if you can download Gawk from here: http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/pac... { match($0,/Startingword/) start=RSTART+RLENGTH+1 sub(/Endingword.*/,"") print substr($0,start) } save the above as script.awk and on command line c:\test> gawk -f script.awk yourfile

Is there a way to do this without installing additional software?

The solution above doesn't work for me. I got the gawk exe and ran the script as: "C:\Program Files\GnuWin32\bin\gawk.exe" -f script.awk test.txt with the script containing: { match($0,/Rip/) start=RSTART+RLENGTH+1 sub(/##.*/,"") print substr($0,start) } (I want it to look for "Rip" and follow it to the following "##" and export the string in the middle)

use this { match($0,/Startingword/) start=RSTART+RLENGTH+1 gsub(/\#\#.*/,"") print substr($0,start) }

If you are not comfortable still, you can use vbscript Set objFS=CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject") strMyFile = "c:\test\test.txt" Set objFile = objFS.OpenTextFile(strMyFile) Do Until objFile.AtEndOfLine strLine = objFile.ReadLine startPos = InStr(1,strLine,"Startingword") If startPos > 0 Then strLine = Mid(strLine,startPos+len("Startingword")) endPos = InStr(startPos,strLine,"##") strLine = Mid(strLine,1,endPos-1) WScript.Echo strLine End If Loop

It's still not working. Maybe I'm not being clear and that's what the problem is. Example log: blah blah 4/10/07 07:50 Rip - blah blah really long sentence more blah blah more stuff ## 4/11/07 10:00 blah blah output sent to file should be: 4/10/07 07:50 Rip - blah blah really long sentence more blah blah more stuff ##