grep for word in text files but show neighbouring lines

[Matt Murphy_1]

Is there a grep utility that will allow me to search for a string in a series of text files (programs) but that will also allow a number of lines before and after the good line to be included.

Thanks,

Matt.

[Pete Randall]

Matt,

I'm attaching the "handy one-liners for sed". I believe you'll find your solution there (if you don't mind using sed, that is).


Pete

[Rodney Hills]

I believe the gnu version of "grep" has a -w option to display a number of lines before and after.

see http://hpux.cs.utah.edu/ to get a copy.

HTH

-- Rod Hills

[Stuart Browne]

The flags for GNU's grep are -An, -Bn and -Cn.

-A or --after-context
-B or --before-context
-C or --context

Each is followed by the number of lines you want before/after.

If you don't want to use GNU's grep though, you will have to use something like the sed solution posted above.

[Hein van den Heuvel]

I'm afraid an sed or perl script will be the
way unless gnu-grep can be obtained.

Now if this question wat for one of HP's other fine operating systems then the anwer is easier.
Under OpenVMS it would be SEARCH/WINDO=(before,after).
Under Tru64: grep -p [for paragraph]

-pparagraph_separator
[Tru64 UNIX] Displays the entire paragraph containing matched lines.
Paragraphs are delimited by paragraph separators, paragraph_separator,
which are patterns in the same form as the search pattern. Lines con-
taining the paragraph separators are used only as separators; they are
never included in the output. The default paragraph separator is a
blank line.


Cheers,
Hein.

[john korterman]

Hi Matt,

I fiddled with an awk command and put into the attached script. You can try running it like this:

#

which tries to find all occurrances of the string "murphy" plus the two lines proceeding and following "murphy" in the syslog.

regards,
John K.