Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi all,

I am using sed for extracting the lines that occurs between the 2 patterns using the following command:

sed -n '/pattern1/,/pattern2/' filename

The above command has no problem and works fine. But I was wondering if there is a way to quit sed when it has extracted the range at least once ? this is required because the file will have only one occurrence of the above pattern range and also the input file on which sed operates is big.

thanks in advance.
sank.

Code:

sed -n -e '/pattern1/,/pattern2/' -e '/pattern2/q' filename

Hi,

thanks for the reply. It works fine when pattern1 and pattern2 are totally different. In some cases, pattern2 will be a part of pattern1 and in this case, it will just print the pattern1 and exits. how can we avoid this ?

Also, pattern2 can occur ( multiple times ) before pattern1 itself since it can pair up with other patterns to form a different range. so, how can we modify the command so that "-e '/pattern2/q' " part is effective only if the search is in the range ?

thanks again,
sank.

Try:

Code:

awk '/pattern2/&&f{exit}f;/pattern1/{f++}' file