Shell Programming and Scripting

dear Zazzybob
my sed is a little on the rusty side:
could you please clarify a little.....
/precipitation/,/^[^:]*$/
" /^[^:]*$/" ? (confused!)
also how does the curly bracket play into the syntax..
if you could give an example using curly brackets I would appreciate it..
this is as far as I go with curly brackets and sed..
ex,. sed -e '/foo/{ h; d; }' -e 'N{g}'
other wise i don't know how to apply it the way you did..
moxxx68
ps. I know its a little off the subject but maybe both I and the poster could learn from an example..

It may be easiest if I explain my example

Code:

#!/bin/sed -nf

/Precipitation/,/^[^:]*$/ {
   /Wednesday/p
}

/Precipitation/,/^[^:]*$/

This says find anything between the word Precipitation, and the first line that doesn't contain a colon (therefore, this allows us to grab just the "Precipitation" block plus the next header). Then, the curly braces allow us to group together any commands we want sed to execute when the condition is met. I suppose you could analogise this with awks pattern/action behaviour. So all I want to do is print the line(s) that contain "Wednesday". I have formed the script to allow for a little bit of "free-form" within the file. With some of the examples given in this thread, they rely on a rigid and strict file format.

Cheers
ZB

cheers

Code:

$ awk '/Precipitation/,/Wednesday/{x=$NF}END{print x}' file1
50

These were all very helpful, my problem is solved, and I learned something

Thank you all very much for your help.

Best regards,

Selma