Searching the output of last

[Larry Wall]

In article <130922 at uunet.UU.NET> rbj at uunet.UU.NET (Root Boy Jim) writes:
: The first file contains login records for today only.
: The second is cumulative for the entire month.
: We upgraded the OS yesterday, so you can extrapolate
: that it would take about an hour alone to run last
: on a whole month's statistics.
: 
: >last|perl -pe '$_ x=/(..:..)...(.*)/&&"'$1'"ge$1&&"'$1'"lt$2'
: >
: >That's gonna be tough for Randal to beat...  :-)
: 
: I just ran it with args 12:34 and 23:45. Here's the timing:
: 137.510u 88.580s 4:58.87 75% 0+0k 212+7io 0pf+0w
: 
: Five minutes for one day. Two and 1/2 hours for the entire month.
: 
: OK, so we're not a typical site :-)

Oh, good grief.  I wasn't optimizing for speed, but brevity (obscurity?).
By all means, read the file directly if you want speed.  There's More
Than One Way To Do It.

Larry