UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

I have a requirement to go to particular line in the file and from there read the contents till it meets a particular criteria. For eg if the contents of the file is like

81 abcd ------------------- Line 1
82 cdfe ------------------- Line 2
83 dfj ------------------- Line 3
84 df ------------------- Line 4
81 dkfh ------------------- Line 5
82 df ------------------- Line 6
83 dlf ------------------- Line 7
84 dif ------------------- Line 8
81 sdfh ------------------- Line 9
82 dfjh ------------------- Line 10
83 kdf ------------------- Line 11
84 dfj ------------------- Line 12

What the program should do is go to line number 5 directly and from there read the contents of the file till it finds the line starting with 81 again.

TIA
Narayana Gupta

From line 5 till the end of file.

Code:

sed -n '5,$p' <filename

For your requirement.

Try this.

Code:

sed -n '5,/^81/p' <filename

Thanks vino, I tried this it is working but a small thing, I want till 81 that means just 4 lines not 5 lines

Now the sed becomes complex. And I am still learning some of the features.

I have taken the following from
http://www.student.northpark.edu/pem...d/sed1line.txt

Code:

 # print the line immediately before a regexp, but not the line
 # containing the regexp
 sed -n '/regexp/{g;1!p;};h'

Modify it, and I think you will get what you are looking for.

-vino

vino thanks for that.

I am able to get it as

sed -n '5,/^81/p' <filename| sed '$d'

That uses two sed calls.

Its always better to achieve the same thing with the least number of commands.

-vino