Dear all,

Greetings.

I would like to ask for your help to extract lines with specific words in addition 2 lines before and after these lines by using awk or sed.

For example, the input file is:

1 ak1 abc1.0
1 ak2 abc1.0
1 ak3 abc1.0
1 ak4 abc1.0
1 ak5 abc1.1
1 ak6 abc1.1
1 ak7 abc1.1
1 ak8 abc1.1
1 ak9 abc1.1
1 ak10 abc1.1
1 ak11 abc1.2
1 ak12 abc1.2
1 ak13 abc1.2
1 ak14 abc1.2
1 ak15 abc1.2

1 ak3 abc1.0
1 ak4 abc1.0
1 ak5 abc1.1
1 ak6 abc1.1
1 ak7 abc1.1
1 ak8 abc1.1
1 ak9 abc1.1
1 ak10 abc1.1
1 ak11 abc1.2
1 ak12 abc1.2

What OS (type of UNIX)?

Dear jim mcnamara,

Sorry... Is x86_64 GNU/Linux the answer for your question?

I am sorry if I did not answer the questions, I am new in this field.

Thank you very much.

Amanda

@amanda, your expected output shows, just a paragraph printing .. If yes, try the below ..

$ nawk '/ak3/,/ak12/' infile
1 ak3 abc1.0
1 ak4 abc1.0
1 ak5 abc1.1
1 ak6 abc1.1
1 ak7 abc1.1
1 ak8 abc1.1
1 ak9 abc1.1
1 ak10 abc1.1
1 ak11 abc1.2
1 ak12 abc1.2
$

Hi Jayan Jay,

Thank you very much for your reply.

Firstly I would like to apologize about my unclear example. Actually I have a big dataset which I need to extract lines with specific words from the 3rd column which is "abc1.1" from this example together with 2 lines above and 2 lines below. This pattern will loop for the whole dataset.

Is there any possibility?

Thank you very much in advance.

Best wishes,
Amanda

Gnu grep has -C option

try this

grep -C 2 "abc1.1" input.txt

Hi Itkamaraj,

Thank you very much for your help. It works perfectly.

Thanks again.

Amanda