Question

I’d like to traverse a text file a pull out groups of lines at a time.
In the example below, I’d like to grep all lines below AAA but stop at bbb (ie all of the ‘xxx’)

Thanks

example:

——-AAA——-
xxx
xxx
xxx
xxx
xxx
——-bbb——–
yyy
yyy
yyy
yyy
——AAA———
xxx
xxx
xxx
xxx
——bbb——–
yyy

Answer 1

if you don’t care about inclusion of AAA and bbb lines, this should suffice for your example

$ awk '/AAA/,/bbb/' file

if you don’t want AAA and bbb lines

$ awk '/bbb/{f=0}/AAA/{f=1;next}f{print}' file

Alternatively, if you have Ruby(1.9+)

$ ruby -0777 -ne 'puts $_.scan(/-+AAA-+(.*?)-+bbb-+/m) ' file