Question

I am looking for a one liner to pull out the first comment block in any file. The comment blocks look like this:

/*
 * This is a 
 * comment block
 */

I’ve been trying to play with sed, but just can’t get it to work right. Help?

Answer 1

sed -n '/^\/\*/,/^ \*\//p;/^ \*\//q' file

Or equivalently:

sed -n '\|^/\*|,\|^ \*/|p;\|^ \*/|q' file

Edit:

Here is a version of the second one above that handle’s the situation mentioned in ghostdog74’s comment:

sed -n '\|^/\*.*\*/|{p;q};\|^/\*|,\|^ \*/|p;\|^ \*/|q' file

And if you want to handle whitespace at the beginning and end of lines:

sed -n '\|^[[:space:]]*/\*.*\*/|{p;q};\|^[[:space:]]*/\*|,\|^ \*/|p;\|^[[:space:]]*\*/|q'