Question

I have a flat file as given below. How do I delete the header and footer from the file which header starts with ‘H:’ and trailer starts with ‘T:’ using UNIX shell script(KSH) and rewrite the rest of the data into a different file?

H:20050427 HEADER RECORD
0000000 00000 000000000 123456 00 654321 DATARECORD
0000000 00000 000000000 123456 00 654321 DATARECORD
0000000 00000 000000000 123456 00 654321 DATARECORD
0000000 00000 000000000 123456 00 654321 DATARECORD
T:20050427 TRAILER RECORD

Answer 1

To remove the first and last line, you could do:

 tail -n +2 input-file | head -n -1 > output-file

… or to just remove any lines beginning with ‘H:’ or ‘T:’ you could do:

 egrep -v '^[HT]:' input-file > output-file