Extracting useful info from swlist

[Simon Hargrave]

I'm writing some script to execute an swlist against all HP servers in our organisation (about 60, ranging from 10.20 -> 11.23), so I can populate our asset register database automatically with installed software details.

I'm basically using...

/usr/sbin/swlist -a os_release -a machine_type -a title @$HOST

...to get information off each host in a for loop. The problem is, I need to extract each field into a variable for processing by the shell. Problem is the output from swlist is whitespace delimited (both spaces and tabs in various formats), and sometimes fields (eg os_release) can be blank.

So, I can't use awk to split based on white-spaces, because some fields shift left if any other fields are blank. I can't use a position-based cut because they appear to be differently spaced on different OS releases.

Question is, what can I do? I can't see that there's an option in swlist to eg give a comma-delimited output, which would be ideal. I can't really think of a way to use awk to figure it out, because either of os_release and machine_type can and sometimes are both blank!

Ideas?

Cheers, Sy

[Mark Grant]

personally, I'd use perl and the \s to split

something like

field1=`/usr/sbin/swlist -a os_release | perl -ne '@a=split /\s+/;print "$a[1]\n"'`

This will give you field 1 (change the 1 to a 2 for the second field).

@a should be an array that contains all the fields as different elements and you can print any one you like.

[Simon Hargrave]

Problem with this is, if you take the following subset of output from swlist: -

100BaseT-01 ?.11.11 * HP-PB 100BaseT;Supptd HW=A3495A;SW=J2759BA
A3495A ?.10.* 9000/[68]?? HP-PB 100BT LAN/9000
A5230A ?.11.00 * 100BT/9000 PCI

FibrChanl-01 ?.11.11 *:*64 PCI-X FibreChannel;Supptd HW=A6826A,A9782A,A9784A

Firmware_Check Checks system firmware
ITOAgent ?.11.* 9000/[78]??:* VPO Agents
Ignite-UX-11-11 HP-UX Installation Utilities for Installing 11.11 Systems
LSOF HPUX 11i LSOF


Probably not easy to see from this, but eg LSOD and Ignite-UX-11-11 have no os_release or machine_types set, so if splitting on white spaces, field 2 would become "HPUX" (from the start of the name field), instead of B.11.11 eg.

[Dietmar Konermann · Accepted solution]

What about using swlist's -v option? It prints each attribute on its own line...

Idea:

/usr/sbin/swlist -v -a os_release -a machine_type -a title |
awk '
/^os_release/ {os_release=$2};
/^machine_type/ {machine_type=$2};
/^title/ {sub(/^title */,""); title=$0};
{
if (title != "") {
printf ("%s|%s|%s\n", os_release, machine_type, title);
title="";
}
}'

Best regards...
Dietmar.

[Simon Hargrave]

Cracking idea, cheers! Needed a little tweaking to work fully (it would display "vendor"'s as software items in the output. The below modified works a charm!

/usr/sbin/swlist -v -a tag -a os_release -a machine_type -a title | awk '
/^bundle/ || /^product/ {interesting=1 ; title=""};
/^tag/ {tag=$2};
/^os_release/ {os_release=$2};
/^machine_type/ {machine_type=$2};
/^title/ {sub(/^title */,""); title=$0};
{if(title != "" && interesting == 1) {
printf("%s,%s,%s,%s\n",tag,os_release,machine_type,title);
interesting=0
}
}'



Cheers