Question

I have a text file (more correctly, a “German style“ CSV file, i.e. semicolon-separated, decimal comma) which has a date and the value of a measurement on each line.
There are stretches of faulty values which I want to remove before further work. I’d like to store these cuts in some script so that my corrections are documented and I can replay those corrections if necessary.

The lines look like this:

28.01.2005 14:48:38;5,166
28.01.2005 14:50:38;2,916
28.01.2005 14:52:38;0,000
28.01.2005 14:54:38;0,000
(long stretch of values that should be removed; could also be something else beside 0)
01.02.2005 00:11:43;0,000
01.02.2005 00:13:43;1,333
01.02.2005 00:15:43;3,250

Now I’d like to store a list of begin and end patterns like 28.01.2005 14:52:38 + 01.02.2005 00:11:43, and the script would cut the lines matching these begin/end pairs and everything that’s between them.

I’m thinking about hacking an awk script, but perhaps I’m missing an already existing tool.

Answer 1

Have a look at sed:

sed '/start_pat/,/end_pat/d'

will delete lines between start_pat and end_pat (inclusive).

To delete multiple such pairs, you can combine them with multiple -e options:

sed -e '/s1/,/e1/d' -e '/s2/,/e2/d' -e '/s3/,/e3/d' ...