Grep log file greater than time stamp

Question

I have a unix log file(application.log), that has logs with timestamp at the starting. I need to search for a pattern \"sent\" in this log file greater than time 2014-03-20

Answer 1

Try:

sed -n '/^2014-03-20 14:05:54/,$ {/sent/p;}' file

Note: This assumes that there is at least 1 line in your log file that actually starts with 2014-03-20 14:05:54 and that it's OK to include matches from that second in time.

If the existence of such a line is not guaranteed, @shellter's awk approach is superior; to put it together:

awk '$0 > "2014-03-20 14:05:54" && $0 ~ "sent"' file