Parsing string with grep

Using grep:

$ echo '[INFO] Total time: 2 minutes 8 seconds' | grep -o '[[:digit:]].*$'
2 minutes 8 seconds

Or sed:

$ echo '[INFO] Total time: 2 minutes 8 seconds' | sed 's/.*: //'
2 minutes 8 seconds

Or awk:

$ echo '[INFO] Total time: 2 minutes 8 seconds' | awk -F': ' '{print $2}'
2 minutes 8 seconds

Or cut:

$ echo '[INFO] Total time: 2 minutes 8 seconds' | cut -d: -f2
 2 minutes 8 seconds

And then read sed & awk, Second Edition.

The sed and perl options do work, but in this trivial case, I'd prefer

 echo "[INFO] Total time: 2 minutes 8 seconds" | cut -d: -f2

If you have something against spaces, you can just use

 echo "[INFO] Total time: 2 minutes 8 seconds" | cut -d: -f2 | xargs

or even...

 echo "[INFO] Total time: 2 minutes 8 seconds" | cut -d: -f2 | cut -c2-

PS. Trivia: you could do this with grep only if grep implemented positive lookbehind like this egrep -o '(?<=: ).*'; Unfortunately neither POSIX extended regex nor GNU extended regex implement lookbehind (http://www.regular-expressions.info/refflavors.html)

If you prefer AWK then it is quite simple

echo "[INFO] Total time: 2 minutes 8 seconds" | awk -F": " '{ print $2 }'

Use sed or perl:

echo "[INFO] Total time: 2 minutes 8 seconds" | sed -e 's/^\[INFO\] Total time:\s*//'
echo "[INFO] Total time: 2 minutes 8 seconds" | perl -pe "s/^\[INFO\] Total time:\s*//;"

If you are getting the info from the terminal then you can grep out the info and use cut with the delimiter to remove everything before the info you want. grep INFO | cut -f2 -d:

If you want the info out of a file then you can grep the file grep INFO somefilename | cut -f2 -d: