MLUG: [MLUG] grepping the 9th line after a matching line
[MLUG] grepping the 9th line after a matching line
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You guys have been absolutely amazing on that list question about copying files. So now I have another question:

Here's a fun problem -- suppose I want to grab the 9th line following a line that matches a pattern. I think perl may be good for this -- I'm pretty sure I can do it as a one-liner. But there are "-A" and "-B" options in the GNU version of egrep that simplify this a little. The "B" and "A" stand for "before" and "after." So...

egrep -A9 [pattern] file

...grabs the matching lines and 9 subsequent lines for each match. The problem is that I don't want the first 8 lines from each match. Fortunately, egrep -A gives me a line between each set of 9 that matches the following regexp pattern: ^--$ That is, it is a single line consisting of nothing but two hyphens. So this gives me the 9th line following each match but with that darned pair of hyphens still there...

egrep -A9 [pattern] file | egrep -B1 '^--$'

...so I grep out the extra hyphen lines:

egrep -A9 [pattern] file | egrep -B1 '^--$' | egrep -v '^--$'

That's fairly straightforward but there is one more annoying problem: The last line is not followed by the ^--$ regular expression, so it is lost. Well, then I can do this but this is getting rather long:

( egrep -A9 [pattern] file | egrep -B1 '^--$' | egrep -v '^--$' ; egrep -A9 [pattern] file | tail -1 )

Long, but it works except under conditions where the sets of 9 lines overlap! Then it totally screws up. Luckily, that condition does not arise in my application, so I'm fine with this.

Question:  Is there a better way?

Mike

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