Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi,

I have a txt file in below format -

Code:

START
1
2
3
4
END
START
5
6
7
8
END
START
9
10
END

My requirement is to go at the last "START" (highlighted in BOLD) and read till "END". Can you please suggest me how to achieve it?

Thanks for your time.

Moderator's Comments:

Please view this code tag video for how to use code tags when posting code and data.

Code:

 awk '{if($0~/START/){i=NR-1;}a[j++]=$0;} END{while(i!=j)print a[i++]}'  input_file

I feel there is a better solution than the above

Code:

awk '/START/{p=1;sect=""}p{sect=sect?sect RS $0:$0}/END/{p=0}END{print sect}' file

Another way:

Code:

perl -e 'foreach (reverse <>){ if (/START/){print reverse(@a);exit};if (/END/ .. /START/){push (@a,$_) unless /END/}}'  infile

Thanks all for your reply.

The AWK solution seems to be suiting better for my requirement.
"awk '/START/{p=1;sect=""}p{sect=sect?sect RS $0:$0}/END/{p=0}END{print sect}' file"

Here is it possible that I can make use of regular expressions with START and END since there is a numeric value appended. E.g. START3/END3.

On the same question, how can I read the same file Starting START3 and read till end of file without considering the END tag? Which means START3, START4 .. till end will be displayed. Can the existing solution be modified?

Thanks again.

The pattern START will, of course, match START3. What strings do you want to match?
------

Code:

awk '/START3/{p=1}p' file

Thanks everyone for your helping hand.