BASH FIX Log File Viewer Home

This is a pure BASH FIX log file viewer I wrote for quick searching through FIX logs when you need to troubleshoot things. It was a quick hack for work. I know there are FIX log viewers out there, but most of the good ones either require X or additional software to be installed (Ruby, Java, etc.) which I don't want to have to install on the servers. I went with plain BASH scripting for portability.

A little detail about the script:
It contains an array with a handful of FIX tags for FIX v4.4 so far (not everything, and I add them as needed). I'll be adding more versions as I go along (probably just 4.3 & 4.2 since that's all we need). It requires two command line options, the log file to search and a search term. I'm sure it's not perfect but it is a work in progress and will surely change a lot over the next couple months as is needed.

Update (25NOV2009): Found a problem with some of our RedHat servers here that use an old enough version of Bash that they don't support non-numeric array keys. I decided it was simple enough to just add case statements within functions to replace the offending arrays. It's not the prettiest, but it works.. The download link has the updated script (which is also viewable here: http://woodenpickle.com/code/fixlogviewer).

If anyone has any comments or suggestions to improve it, please feel free to email me at code AT woodenpickle DOT com..



Click here to download - 2.2k (zipped)

Additional Info:

NOTE: The script is configured to parse the format of our logs (sample below).. Which may be different from yours. This is something that can be changed quite easily if you're familiar with BASH scripts. It may even be possible to augment the script to grab only the section of each line between tag 8 and tag 10 (those are the first & last tags if I remember correctly) but this isn't too important to me since all our logs follow the same format. Nevertheless I may add that at some point to maintain compatibility with a broader range of formatting styles.