sed/awk search and delete lines

[Lisa Mauer]

I have a programmer request to search through files (cobol compiled listings), search the entire file for a string "LAYOUT", once that string is found, copy from and including the string "LAYOUT" to the end of file and put the output to a new file. Not being a sed expert I thought I would post here to see if anyone could help. Thanks!

[Pete Randall · Accepted solution]

Courtesy of Princess Paula's handy SED one liner's (see attached):

# print section of file from regular expression to end of file
sed -n '/regexp/,$p'

[H.Merijn Brand (procura]

# perl -ne 'BEGIN{$/=undef}<>=~s/.*?(?=LAYOUT)//s&&print' file >newfile

[H.Merijn Brand (procura]

Pete, correct - of course - but if you take it literally, this will not do what it should if "LAYOUT" is halfway the line


Blah LAYOUT blah

will leave the first Blah plus space in place where the case wanted "copy from and including the string" which should IMHO strip everything in front

# perl -ne '/LAYOUT/..undef and print' does the same as your (Paula's) sed command

[Pete Randall]

Merijn,

I, of course, defer to your superior Perl knowledge.

;^)

Pete

[Lisa Mauer]

Ok... guess I am just a perl dunce, but when I run it I get this error:
Can't modify in substitution at -e line 1, near "s/.*?(?=LAYOUT)//s&&"
Execution of -e aborted due to compilation errors.

Sorry ;(

[Robin Wakefield]

Hi Lisa,

Try:

perl -ne 'BEGIN{$/=undef}s/.*?(?=LAYOUT)//s&&print' file > newfile

Rgds, Robin

[H.Merijn Brand (procura]

Thanks for the correction! At least it proves either that I'm not perfect (indeed I am not) and/or I am tired (indeed I am)

Don't ever take every solution I give for granted :)

[Ceesjan van Hattum]

Assuming that a line begins with LAYOUT, like

inputfile:
abc adf
abc asdf
LAYOUT
adf asdf
asdf asdf


awk '{if ($1=="LAYOUT") {
start_print=1 }
if (start_print==1){
print $0 }
}' inputfile

Regards,
Ceesjan

[Lisa Mauer]

Worked like a charm!!! As always - Thank you very much!!!!