hello people,
i am trying to accomplish what i thought should be a simple task: find a token in a file and delete a number (let's say 25) of lines following the token.

in sed, i can't figure out how to do a relative address (i.e. something like /token/25dd to delete 25 lines) and in gnu grep, if i use the -A 25 option, it only works with a positive match, but not with -v

i suppose i could accomplish same by matching the number of open and closed parentheses (), since that's how the file is formatted, but i'm also not sure how to do that

any thoughts would be most welcome!

thanks in advance

ilya

P.S. for example

if the file contains:
===========
a: (
some text(more)
blah (blah)
)

b: (
another(word)
and stuff(gf)
)

===========

i would want to remove the 4 lines from a: to )

GNU sed supports this.

from the manual page
So....

sed '/^a:/,+3 d' filename

should do what you want.

Cheers
ZB

Using awk...

awk '/^a:/{c=4};--c<0' file

thank you, thank you zazzybob and ygor!

In defence of my lack of RTFM: MANPATH on my solaris box! i got the solaris sed manpage, rather than the gnu one