You can always try using awk, sed, and grep to manipulate the output stream. Here's something to get you started:
tail /var/log/maillog | awk '{print $1" "$2" - ("$3")"}'
Awk can automatically separate elements of a line when they are separated by whitespace. The first element is referred to as $1, the second $2, etc. The above command will print out the date like you wanted:
Jun 22 - (20:20:30)
Use quotation marks to create static values in the output. Grep will allow you to easily select lines that you want in the output but you'll have to be sure you accurately identify only those lines you want. It can also be used in the format "grep -v" to output everything BUT the pattern that follows. You can pipe the stream though grep first to limit the lines you process like this:
tail /var/log/maillog | grep message | grep -v sent | awk '{print $1" "$2" - ("$3")"}'
The above will only process lines that have the word "message" in them and also don't contain the word "sent". The solution you will need will really depend on how many different types of line formats you need to process and how different they are from one another with respect to the relative positions of the pieces of the line you want to use. If the types of lines you are looking to extract are too different, then this apporach won't work too well. At that point you might want to look into using something like Perl which was built for tasks like this.
Another useful command to use is sed, but regular expressions are a bit more complicated and difficult to cover adequately in an email message. Basically, they allow extremely complex pattern matching and replacement once you learn the syntax. Again, your success rate will depend on the relative differences between line formats. If you do some digging and look up these commands, you'll find some really cool stuff even if it doesn't help with this particular problem.
I hope this helps. :)
Shockwave
oooh.. missed this one.. this looks interesting...
thanks.. will have a play! :)
Craig
