Question

Given this input file:

SectionMarker and some random text here
this is the text in section 1 
this is the text in section 1
this is the text in section 1
etc
SectionMarker and some random text here also
this is the text in section 2 
this is the text in section 2
this is the text in section 2
etc
SectionMarker and some random text too
this is the text in section 3 
this is the text in section 3
this is the text in section 3
etc

How do I split this file in pieces using awk or sed or whatever ?

This is what I tried, but didn’t work:

awk -vRS='\SectionMarker[:print:]\n' 'NR==1 {print}' ./data.log 

Answer 1

this one-liner should do the job:

 awk '{x+=($0~/^SectionMarker/)?1:0}x<2' data.log

test

kent$  cat data.log
SectionMarker and some random text here
this is the text in section 1 
this is the text in section 1
this is the text in section 1
etc
SectionMarker and some random text here also
this is the text in section 2 
this is the text in section 2
this is the text in section 2
etc
SectionMarker and some random text too
this is the text in section 3 
this is the text in section 3
this is the text in section 3
etc

kent$  awk '{x+=($0~/^SectionMarker/)?1:0}x<2' data.log
SectionMarker and some random text here
this is the text in section 1 
this is the text in section 1
this is the text in section 1
etc

i don’t know how many sections in your real problem you want to grab. you could place exit; in that onliner to make awk not process the whole file.