Shell Programming and Scripting

How do I filter a long report, with the "STARTWORD" and "STOPWORD" as the variables to use in my awk command, to print the whole data segment that only contains the matched start/stop word?

awk '/start/, /stop/' file <- this prints the line, though I need to print the whole segment. Newline separates each data segment.

Thanks and good to be back,

Apalex

---------------
Report below:
----------------

Time Stamp line Data1(no common string)
STARTWORD.................STOPWORD
Nextline
Nextline

Time Stamp line Data2 (no common string)
NOTNEEDED REPORT.................WORD
Nextline
Nextline

Time Stamp line Data3 (no common string)
STARTWORD.................STOPWORD
Nextline
Nextline

Time Stamp line Data4 (no common string)
NOTNEEDED REPORT.................WORD
Nextline
Nextline

Time Stamp line Data5(no common string)
STARTWORD.................STOPWORD
Nextline
Nextline

I don't think I understand entirely, but you can try this...

Code:

 awk -v RS='' '/START.*STOP/{print $0 "\n"}' file1

When RS is null then awk uses blank lines to separate records, so the result is...

Time Stamp line Data1(no common string)
STARTWORD.................STOPWORD
Nextline
Nextline

Time Stamp line Data3 (no common string)
STARTWORD.................STOPWORD
Nextline
Nextline

Time Stamp line Data5(no common string)
STARTWORD.................STOPWORD
Nextline
Nextline