Bash script: using variables / parameter in sed - bash

Question

I am trying to write a little bash script, where you can specify a number of minutes and it will show the lines of a log file from those last X minutes.
To get the lines, I am using sed
sed -n '/time/,/time/p' LOGFILE
On CLI this works perfectly, in my script however, it does not.
# Get date
now=$(date "+%Y-%m-%d %T")
# Get date minus X number of minutes -- $1 first argument, minutes
then=$(date -d "-$1 minutes" +"%Y-%m-%d %T")
# Filter logs -- $2 second argument, filename
sed -n '/'$then'/,/'$now'/p' $2
I have tried different approaches and none of them seem to work:
result=$(sed -n '/"$then"/,/"$now"/p' $2)
sed -n "/'$then'/,/'$now'/p" "$2"
sed -n "/$then/,/$now/p" $2
sed -n "/$then/,/$now/p" "$2
Any sugesstions?
I am on Debian 5, echo $SHELL says /bin/sh
EDIT : The script produces no output, so there is no error showing up.
In the logfile every entry starts with a date like this 2013-05-15 14:21:42,794

Answer 1

I assume that the main problem is that you try to perform an arithmetic comparison by string matching. sed -n '/23/,/27/p' gives you the lines between the first line that contains 23 and the next line that contains 27 (and then again from the next line that contains 23 to the next line that contains 27, and so on). It does not give you all lines that contain a number between 23 and 27. If the input looks like
19
22
24
26
27
30
it does not output anything (since there is no 23). An awk solution that uses string matching has the same problem. So, unless your then date string occurs verbatim in the log file, your method will fail. You have to convert your date strings into numbers (drop the -, <space>, and :) and then check whether the resulting number is in the right range, using an arithmetical comparison rather than a string match. This goes beyond the capabilities of sed; awk and perl can do it rather easily. Here is a perl solution:
#!/bin/bash
NOW=$(date "+%Y%m%d%H%M%S")
THEN=$(date -d "-$1 minutes" "+%Y%m%d%H%M%S")
perl -wne '
if (m/^(....)-(..)-(..) (..):(..):(..)/) {
$date = "$1$2$3$4$5$6";
if ($date >= '"$THEN"' && $date <= '"$NOW"') {
print;
}
}' "$2"

Answer 2

Don't give yourself a headache with nested quotes. Use the -v option with awk to pass the value of a shell variable into the script:
#!/bin/bash
# Get date
now=$(date "+%Y-%m-%d %T")
# Get date minus X number of minutes -- $1 first argument, minutes
delta=$(date -d "-$1 minutes" +"%Y-%m-%d %T")
# Filter logs -- $2 second argument, filename
awk -v n="$now" -v d="$delta" '$0~n,$0~d' $2
Also don't use variable names of shell builtins i.e then.