Shell Programming and Scripting

Dear Unix Experts ,

Below is a small section of a large file with the following list:

1. Starts with string " interest" as the heading
2. Followed by a list of activities
3. Ends with a blank line before starting with another different list.

E.g.

Code:

Sporting interest
football
tennis
swimming
golf
 
<next section>
.......
........

Below are the sed commands attempted without success:

Code:

sed -n '/Sporting interest/,/^$/p'
sed -n '/Sporting interest/,/^$/!p'

I need to find a way to determine the immediate last line at the end of sporting interest, before looping between the list of sports.

I am running Solaris 10 on Intel x86 platform.

Your advice would be much appreciated.

Thanks,

George

I've edited the original post fixing the code tags - hope that's what your original input file looks like.
Please edit if otherwise.

What the desired output would look like?
Or what would need to be done with each 'block' (if that's the objective)?

Of course your attempts will not work as there is a space in that empty (better: not-so-empty) line making your regex fail. Either remove that space or include it in the regex!

Thanks to both vgersh99 & rudiC for your advices thus far, I want it to be able to print the line / list of sporting interests. Below is my desire output:

Code:

 
football
tennis
swimming
golf

I have tried sed -n '/interest/,/^$/p' but only the heading line sporting interest was printed as opposed to the list of sporting interest.

In addition, I am looking for way to print content between certain pattern strings or first blank line (means end of list) in either sed, awk or both.

Thanks again,

George

Your sed cmd works for me. And it will for you, given you adapt either the file or the regex as stated in my post #3

Code:

awk '/^ *$/ {p=0} p; /Sporting interest/ {p=1}'

Code:

sed -n -e '/Sporting interest/!b' -e ':a' -e 'n; /^ *$/b' -e 'p;ba'

Thanks MadeInGermany for offerring your advice,

Your first suggest below using awk worked provided there are no blank lines between heading (Sporting interest) and the list itself:

Code:

awk '/^ *$/ {p=0} p; /Sporting interest/ {p=1}' interest.txt

However, this awk statement failed when the content of interest.txt include a blank line below:

Code:

Sporting interest
 
football
soccer
golf

Can we improve on this awk to accommodate blank lines between individual items but should stop at the end of this list?

It would be great if you could explain how the awk statement work as well.

Thanks again,

George