Hi ripat

u almost read my mind. removing those things will be helpful but not necessary for me. My final objective, which i didnt mention, was to search for pattern 'condition' after retrieving the text and then output the job name which is there after 'condition'.

I tried running the code u gave and this is what its giving

while read str
> do
> sed -n "/-- $str --/, /^$/ {/-- $str --/b;/^$/b;p}" b1
> done<a1
sed: command garbled: /-- ab --/, /^$/ {/-- ab --/b;/^$/b;p}
sed: command garbled: /-- cd --/, /^$/ {/-- cd --/b;/^$/b;p}
sed: command garbled: /-- ef --/, /^$/ {/-- ef --/b;/^$/b;p}

can u explain the command line in a bit of detail...for e.g. what is the b obtion for :- {/-- $str --/b;/^$/b;p} is it for replacing with a blank?

I also ran the awk script. That is not returning anything..just the command prompt.

while read str
do
awk 'BEGIN{FS="\n"; RS="\n\n"; OFS="\n"} /-- ab --/ {for (i = 2; i <= NF; i++) print $i}' b1
done<a1

"/\/\*--* $str --*\*\//,/^ *$/ p
Here trying to match from a line with pattern /\/\*--* $str --*\*\// to another line with the pattern /^ *$/.If you want to specify two address then you have to separate it with comma.

/^ *$/
* matches any number or none of the single character that immediately precedes it.So this will match empty line as well as lines with blanks.

thanks anbu

this funda i hadnt come across in the 2 months that i hv been learning unix. i thought only sed '1,3 p' works. didnt know patterns can also be matched the same way.

b is for branching. If label is given control will transfer to that label or else control is transferred to the end of the script.
You can use d to achieve the same result