[yjftsjthsd-h]

I'm not confident that I understand what you're asking for, but couldn't you just sed off the timestamp from every line? Or for a more extreme example, I have occasionally used ... tr, I think? to completely remove all numbers from logs in order to aggregate error messages without worrying about the fact that they kept including irrelevant changing numbers (something like tail -5000 logfile | tr -d [0-9] | sort | uniq -c | sort -n or so).

[winwang]

how would you do it if your logs were printed on paper with a printer, each line printed with stochastic timing (due to a bug), with an ink containing a chemical tracer with halflife `h` (after being put to paper), but the ink is randomly sampled from several (`m`) inks of different halflives `h1`, h2`,... `hn`? assume `p` different printers scattered across the 10 most populous US cities. you may use standard unix utilities.

[yjftsjthsd-h]

Have interns shovel it all into scanners, run the result through tesseract, then do the thing I said before. Nonetheless, I don't think your question is sincere; what point are you actually trying to get at?

[winwang]

Sorry, I was just trying to make a joke (about both insane systems and interview questions) since the question you answered was a bit unclear. Guess it didn't land, haha.

[yjftsjthsd-h]

Ah, that makes much more sense. It read as somewhat aggressive in a way that I couldn't quite make sense of; my best guess was that you were insinuating that the unix tools I was reaching for were arcane and unwieldy. Thanks for clarifying.