Shell Programming and Scripting

I have a file called merge2.t:

Code:

Hi
Hello how are you.
</Endtag> <New> I am fine.</New>
This is a test.
freelong
how

Here is the SED:

Code:

sed -n ' /<\/Endtag>/ !{
        H
}
        /<\/Endtag>/ {
        x
        p
}' merge2.t

Why the output is:

Code:

Hi
Hello how are you.
</Endtag> <New> I am fine.</New>

I think the

Code:

</Endtag> <New> I am fine.</New>

should not be printed, since, I use x, which exchange the pattern space, and hold space, and I use H, so, only:

Code:

Hi
Hello how are you.

should be in the hold space.
</Endtag> <New> I am fine.</New> should be in the pattern space, and exchange, but why it is also be printed?
thanks.

Why don't you do something like this to get the same result?

Code:

sed -n '/<\/Endtag>/q;p' file

or:

Code:

awk '/<\/Endtag>/{exit}1' file

Thanks a lot Franklin52.
Tell you what, I learned the AWK from all of your posts.
I spend 2 weeks to read every of your previous posts, and made detailed notes.
Thank you so much, I think I learned more from your posts than the SED&AWK book that you recommended to people here.

Regarding this posts, actually I realized this problem when I was trying to finished another task.

Do you know why? Why when I use the x or g, the program will still print the current line </Endtag> bla bla.
Suppose this line should be in hold space, right?

That's right, you should get the desired output but the first line is empty and it's not efficient to do it this way.
Do you have a typo in your code?

/<\/Endtab>/ instead of /<\/Endtag>/ on the first line?

Regards

There might be control or non-printing characters embedded in your file otherwise your sed script works correctly.

Code:

cat -vet file