CODEWITHSUNDEEP
bashawk
Chris
Chris

Reputation: 43

Using awk to get lines between two patterns

newbie with awk and trying to write a bash script to use it to print lines between two patterns in a log file and for the life of me I cannot make it work.

I am thinking I need to escape some of the characters.

Here's an example of the section of log I am trying to get lines from:

Processing... AP710  (/var/opt/testsys/rptprint/AP710)
sidjosajdois
sokds3488sds
doskdoskdoskdo
sodk229929
sending entire report to Job Mgr (spool) for user

I want the four lines between the "Processing..." line (first pattern) and the "sending" line (second pattern), and there is only one section of the log that has this above section with both the first pattern line and second pattern line.

I've tried using awk with the following command using a portion of the first pattern, and escaping the "/" characters as needed:

awk '/\/var\/opt\/testsys\/rptprint\/AP710/{flag=1;next}/sending entire report to Job Mgr/{flag=0}flag' log

But it gives me some other different section of the log that also happens to have the path "/var/opt/testsys/rptprint/AP710", so then I tried changing it to have more of the line (first pattern) by adding "Processing..." and it doesn't return anything....

awk '/Processing\.\.\. AP710 \(\/var\/opt\/testsys\/rptprint\/AP710/{flag=1;next}/sending entire report to Job Mgr/{flag=0}flag' log

Can someone give some guidance about awk so I can get the lines between the 2 patterns? After spending a few hours I am going a little bonkers trying to figure it out, I think my being new to awk is causing me to miss something obvious.

Cheers.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 947

Answers (1)

Ed Morton
Ed Morton

Reputation: 204558

Whenever you find yourself escaping characters in a regexp to make them literal, really consider whether or not you should be using a regexp or if instead you should be doing a string comparison. In fact, always start out with a string comparison and switch to regexp if you need to.

$ awk '
    $0=="sending entire report to Job Mgr (spool) for user" { inSection=0 }
    inSection;
    $0=="Processing... AP710  (/var/opt/testsys/rptprint/AP710)" { inSection=1 }
' file
sidjosajdois
sokds3488sds
doskdoskdoskdo
sodk229929

Upvotes: 3

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