I was checking the memory on approximately 140 servers using ansible:
ansible --user root -k -i servers.list -m shell -a "free -h; mysql" test
but the output appears over several lines e.g.
server103.domain.dev | SUCCESS | rc=0 >> total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 94G 44G 49G 59M 203M 4.6G -/+ buffers/cache: 39G 54G Swap: 0B 0B 0B
but what I wanted was the server name and the total memory available. So I first grepped the output to remove the lines I didn’t want e.g.
grep -A3 "domain.dev" | egrep -v "^--|Swap|total|buffer"
leaving me with two lines of output per server e.g.
server103.domain.dev | SUCCESS | rc=0 >> Mem: 94G 44G 49G 59M 203M 4.6G server100.domain.dev | SUCCESS | rc=0 >> Mem: 94G 54G 40G 59M 207M 7.7G
so to combine the two lines for each server into one line:
paste - - -d";\n" < inputfile.txt
The ‘paste’ command combines using two hyphens – each representing a line of input. The delimiter between the first line and the second line is a semi-colon and after the second line uses a line break.
Once I had the memory output from each server on a single line with the server name it was easy to sort and format the output.
