Perlify some awk'ing for SPAM graphing

hacker has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I'm working on some SPAM graphing with mrtg and gnuplot, and have run into a bit of a conversion I'd like to try to migrate to perl. Basically I have the following:

   grep ^"From " SPAM-mbox |   \
   awk '{$1 = $2 = $6 = "";    \
         gsub(/-0[45]00/, ""); \
         gsub(" ", "-");       \
         print $0}' |          \
   sort |                      \ 
   sed s/-$//g |               \
   uniq -c > spamstatfile
[download]

This returns the following:

      1 --Fri-Jun-13--2003
      1 --Fri-Jun-20--2003
      2 --Mon-Jun-9--2003
     10 --Tue-Jun-24--2003
      3 --Wed-Jun-11--2003
      1 --Wed-Jun-18--2003
[download]

What I'm trying to do, is swap the first and second columns, but I can't figure out how to easily do that (either with awk's backtracking, or with this converted into a perl one-liner). Once I can do this (without manually swapping the columns), I'll be shoving it into gnuplot with:

   set xdata time
   set timefmt "%b-%d-%Y"
   plot "spamstatfile" using 1:2
[download]

Any ideas on how I can swap those columns either with perl or awk? Or perhaps a better way to do this entirely in perl?

Update:
jmacnamara's suggestion got me 99.99% of the way there. Here's a slightly-modified version which now works:

perl -lane '$h{"$F[3]-$F[4]-$F[6]"}++ 
     if /^From /; END {
        print $_, "\t", $h{$_} for keys %h
     }' SPAM  > spamdates
[download]

And then I just run gnuplot -persist spam.gnuplot across my control file. Done.

Now to fancy it up a bit and add more heuristics.

Comment on Perlify some awk'ing for SPAM graphing Select or Download Code

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Re: Perlify some awk'ing for SPAM graphing by jmcnamara (Monsignor) on Jun 24, 2003 at 13:49 UTC
For my `mbox` file the following one-liner gives the same output as your program, except that the columns are reversed (as requested) and the data is unsorted: `perl -lane '$h{"--$F[2]-$F[3]-$F[4]--$F[6]"}++ if /^From /; / END{print $_, "\t", $h{$_} for keys %h}' SPAM-mbox` [download] If you need sorted data you could use the system `sort` or add `sort` before `keys` above: -- John.	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Perlify some awk'ing for SPAM graphing by Abigail-II (Bishop) on Jun 24, 2003 at 14:18 UTC
I don't recall `gnuplot` requiring the columns to be used in order. Did you try plotting with `using 2:1`? That would be my first line of attack. Abigail	[reply]
Re: Perlify some awk'ing for SPAM graphing by bobn (Chaplain) on Jun 24, 2003 at 13:28 UTC
`perl -ane 'chomp @F; print "$F[1] $F[0]\n"' spamstatfile` update: oops, you wanted edit in place, not to stdout: `perl -i.bak -ane 'chomp @F; print "$F[1] $F[0]\n"' spamstatfile` --Bob Niederman, http://bob-n.com	[reply] [d/l] [select]