Question

i have a text file like this:

********** time1 **********
line of text1
line of text1.1
line of text1.2
********** time2 **********
********** time3 **********
********** time4 **********
line of text2.1
line of text2.2
********** time5 **********
********** time6 **********
line of text3.1

i want to extract line of text and the time(without the stars) above it and store it in a file.(time with no line of text beneath them have to be ignored). I want to do this preferably with grep and awk.
So for example, my output for the above code should be

time1 : line of text1
time1 : line of text1.1
time1 : line of text1.2
time4 : line of text2.1
time4 : line of text2.2
time6 : line of text3

how do i go about it?

Answer 1

This assumes that there are no spaces in the time and that there is only one (or zero) line of text after each time marker.

awk '$1 ~ /\*+/ {prev = $2} $1 !~ /\*+/ {print prev, ":", $0}' inputfile