Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi, I am searching for a fast awk hack to eliminate from an ICS file events which have been modified at a certain time.

The structure for parsing is the following:

BEGIN:VEVENT
....
LAST-MODIFIED:...some date...
...
END:VEVENT

If the date matches for example LAST-MODIFIED:20110823 the entire VEVENT (between begin and end) block should not be echoed to standard output; all other blocks should be echoed without change.

Many thanks for any help!
Best, Mike

Have a go with this:

Code:

#!/usr/bin/env ksh

awk -v date=${1:-nodate} '
    /BEGIN:VEVENT/ { cache = 1; }

    /LAST-MODIFIED:/ {
        if( index( $0, date ) )
            drop = 1;
        else
            printf( "%s", cached_lines );
        cached_lines = "";
        cache = 0;
    }

    cache  {
        cached_lines = cached_lines $0 "\n";
        next;
    };

    !drop { print; }

    /END:VEVENT/ { drop = 0; }
'

Many thanks for your speedy help. This worked just perfectly!
Cheers, Mike