Question

Is there a way with Grep to use the -v switch to ignore a line and the next number of lines after it. Its basically to filter exceptions from a log file i.e.

Valid log entry 1
Exception exceptionname
    at a.b.c
    at d.e.f
    ...
Valid log entry 2

grep it to produce :

Valid log entry 1
Valid log entry 2

I have tried grep -v Exception -A 2

but this doesn’t work.

Any ideas would be appreciated.

Answer 1

Try awk:

awk -v nlines=2 '/^Exception/ {for (i=0; i<nlines; i++) {getline}; next} 1'