Shell Programming and Scripting

Try this?

Code:

awk '/^Begin/{getline}/^End/{next}1' input_file

--ahamed

I cut and pasted but it doesn't look like there are the right amount of spaces in my post - there should be three spaces after 'Begin' and before the ':'. With 'End', there are five spaces before the ':'.
Let me try pasting again.

Begin : Transaction Id 1234 04-Oct-2011 13:44:22.24 Username smith
End : Transaction Id 1234 04-Oct-2011 13:44:22.25

I modified and ran again: nawk '/^End :/ && A { A=""; next } A { print A ; A="" } /^Begin :/ { A=$0 ; next } 1' 20111005.trl > testnawk &

I think this may have solved it but need to do some testing on a much bigger file.

Is this finding 'End :' putting that in a place holder, then finding if 'Begin :' is the next line above and deleting both or printing everything but those lines ?

Thank you !

Yes it's storing the line in A and printing later, have a look a ahamed101's solution it just calls getline to throw away the being line and process the line following.

Also, to post data as is put it between [code] and [/code] tags.

Looks like it truncated my whitespace yet again ...
Will keep you posted on this - pretty sure it works !
Thank you !

---------- Post updated at 02:15 PM ---------- Previous update was at 02:13 PM ----------

The getline solution took out all of my 'Begin :' lines ...except for one in the middle of the file.

Thank you though !

The getline solution just egrep -ve '^Begin|^End'

If you only want to retain the Begin/End block who contains at least 1 or more lines (and keeping the Begin and End lines of those blocks) then you can go for :

Code:

nawk '{A[NR]=$0}/^Begin/{b=NR}/^End/&&((NR-b)>1){for(i=b-1;++i<=NR;) print A[i]}' infile

you can then play with b or b-1 as well as <NR or <=NR of the "for" loop depending on your need of the Bein/End lines or not