Printing text between line numbers or patterns

We may need to print a selected portion of a file, either a range of line numbers or a range matched by a start and end pattern.

Getting ready

Awk, grep, or sed will select lines to print, based on condition. It's simplest to use grep to print lines that include a pattern. Awk is the most versatile tool.

How to do it...

To print the text between line numbers or patterns, follow these steps:

1. Print the lines of a text in a range of line numbers, M to N:

$ awk 'NR==M, NR==N' filename

 Awk can read from stdin:

$ cat filename | awk 'NR==M, NR==N'

2. Replace M and N with numbers:

$ seq 100 | awk 'NR==4,NR==6' 
        4 
        5 
        6

 

 

3. Print the lines of text between a start_pattern and end_pattern:

$ awk '/start_pattern/, /end _pattern/' filename

 Consider this example:

$ cat section.txt 
        line with pattern1 
        line with pattern2 
        line with pattern3 
        line end with pattern4 
        line with pattern5 

        $ awk '/pa.*3/,...