Extract float from text line with sed?

I am issuing a sed replace on a line, trying to extract a particular floating-point value, but all that appears to be matched is the right-side of the decimal

Text Line:

63.544: [GC 63.544: [DefNew: 575K->63K(576K), 0.0017902 secs]63.546: [Tenured: 1416K->1065K(1536K), 0.0492621 secs] 1922K->1065K(2112K), 0.0开发者_开发技巧513331 secs]

If I issue s/^.*\([0-9]*\.[0-9]*\): \[Tenured:.*$/\1/, my output is:

.546

I'm wanting the 63.546 out of the line. Why is the very first [0-9]* not matching?

Also match the ] before the number you want:

s/^.*]\([0-9]*\.[0-9]*\): \[Tenured:.*$/\1/

Per comment below, here is a more generic approach, matching a non-digit first:

s/^.*[^0-9]\([0-9]*\.[0-9]*\): \[Tenured:.*$/\1/

My feeling is that your .* at the beginning is acting greedy, so it absorbs everything up to the dot, but I could be wrong.

Don't use sed. I gave up on this. perl is a better choice (I was starting to play with it) but the solution with awk beats me. Go for that, unless you really love sed for some particular reason...

use awk instead sed. why bother creating complex regex?

$ more file
63.544: [GC 63.544: [DefNew: 575K->63K(576K), 0.0017902 secs]63.546: [Tenured: 1416K->1065K(1536K), 0.0492621 secs] 1922K->1065K(2112K), 0.0513331 secs]

$ awk -vRS="]" -F":" '$1+0==$1{print $1}' file
63.544
63.546

As Stefano pointed out, the pattern is performing a greedy match at the beginning of your text input.

If you can use perl, this command works to match your line on standard input:

perl -e '<STDIN> =~ m/^.*?([\d]+\.[\d]+):\s+\[Ten/ && print "$1\n";'