assuming that we have a file containing the following:
chapter 1 blah blah blah num blah num num blah num blah ... blah num chapter 2 blah blah
and we want to grep this file so we take the lines
from chapter 1 blah blah
to blah num
(the line before the next chapter).
The only things we know are
- the stating string
chapter 1 blah blah
- somewhere after that there is another line starting with
chapter
a dummy way to do this is
grep -A <num> -i "chapter 1" <file>
with large enough <num>
so the whole chapter will be in it.
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Answer
This is easy to do with awk
awk '/chapter/ {f=0} /chapter 1/ {f=1} f' file chapter 1 blah blah blah num blah num num blah num blah ... blah num
It will print the line if flag f
is true.
The chapter 1
and next chapter
to changes the flag.
You can use range with awk
but its less flexible if you have other stuff to test.
awk '/chapter 1/,/chapter [^1]/ {if (!/chapter [^1]/) print}' file chapter 1 blah blah blah num blah num num blah num blah ... blah num