Shell Programming and Scripting

If you call it inefficient, I fully agree. As mentioned before, useless is a different thing. With your experience you should have noticed that the request for information was from a noob. By keeping it simple (but indeed not efficient) it is easier to understand. It would have been better if I had given the efficient solution as well. But in that case also more efficient solutions for data handling (like Perl) should be mentioned (without saying that shell scripting is useless for data handling)

and for your information, I never said this was hard for me to read :-)

If you didn't know, "useless use of cat" is a fairly well-known phrase in Unix scripting.

Incidentally, in this case I don't think using a pipeline is simpler or easier to understand than just supplying the filename as a parameter...

You may try:

sed -n '/^machine/p;/^Owner/p' infile

thanks

(afaik)

Code:

egrep -A1  "^machine" script.txt > outputfile

should be the same as:

Code:

grep -e -A1  "^machine" script.txt > outputfile

You missed the -A1, as well as there is no need for [ICODE]cat[/ICODE]

Hope this helps

Almost...

Code:

egrep ...

is the same as:

Code:

grep -E

on systems that both have egrep (which is now obsolescent) and have a -E option in grep (which some very old versions do not have).

Code:

awk -F" " '/machine|Owner/ { print}' file

You are incorrect in several ways here.

That UUOC looks clearer to you means -- to be blunt -- that you should learn what shell scripts are supposed to look like, instead of relying on bad old habits.

If you really really want to, you can put redirection at the front too in most cases, to get the same 'benefit' without UUOC. <inputfile awk ...