Generic command to search for a part of a text file and print it (using awk or sed)

Question

Which command should I use to print a part of text files knowing where this part starts and finishes?

For example:

columnA columnB columnC
baba     bobo    bibi
caca     coco    cici  
.         .      .
.         .      .
zaza    zeze     zizi
EndA    EndB    EndC

In all my files I have exactly the same text for columnA(columnB ...) and EndA(EndB ...), what I want to do is to print what is in between them, i.e., baba(bobo ...) which is different for each file.

I was doing that using, grep | cut | tail, but then I have to write ( and find) new patterns each time I have a new file as the number of lines of each of them are different. I suppose there is a much more smarter ( and generic) way to do that using awk or sed.

IIUC, [this](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1187354/excluding-first-and-last-lines-from-sed-start-end) might be an answer to your question. — Thor, Feb 11 '13 at 17:34

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Feb 11 '13 at 17:13

1

If you're looking print all but the first and last lines you could do

sed '1d; $d' file.txt

answered Feb 11 '13 at 17:13

Eric

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score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Feb 11 '13 at 17:20

1

and next to the sed solution, awk can be used as wel:

BEGIN {
  output=0;
}

$1 ~ /columnA/ || $1 ~ /endA/ {
  output=!output;
  next;
}

{ if(start_output) print $0 }

answered Feb 11 '13 at 17:20

Vincent De Baere

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2
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score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Feb 11 '13 at 17:10

0

sed has ranges:

 sed -ne '/^columnA/,/^EndA/p'

answered Feb 11 '13 at 17:10

thiton

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score 0 · Answer 4 · answered Feb 12 '13 at 01:23

0

you can use head and tail

head -n-1 temp.txt | tail -n +2

Output

baba     bobo    bibi
caca     coco    cici
.         .      .
.         .      .
zaza    zeze     zizi

answered Feb 12 '13 at 01:23

Mirage

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Generic command to search for a part of a text file and print it (using awk or sed)

4 Answers4