Question

I have a directory full of files and I need to pull the headers and footers off of them. They are all variable length so using head or tail isn’t going to work. Each file does have a line I can search for, but I don’t want to include the line in the results.

It’s usually

*** Start (more text here) 

And ends with

*** Finish (more text here) 

I want the file names to stay the same, so I need to overwrite the originals, or write to a different directory and I’ll overwrite them myself.

Oh yeah, it’s on a linux server of course, so I have Perl, sed, awk, grep, etc.

Answer 1

Try the flip flop! ‘..’ operator.

# flip-flop.pl use strict; use warnings;  my $start  = qr/^\*\*\* Start/; my $finish = qr/^\*\*\* Finish/;  while ( <> ) {     if ( /$start/ .. /$finish/ ) {         next  if /$start/ or /$finish/;         print $_;     } } 

U can then use the -i perl switch to update your file(s) like so…..

 $ perl -i'copy_*' flip-flop.pl data.txt  

…which changes data.txt but makes a copy beforehand as ‘copy_data.txt’.