Question: I'd like to print a single line directly following a line that contains a matching pattern.
My version of sed will not take the following syntax (it bombs out on +1p) which would seem like a simple solution:
sed -n '/ABC/,+1p' infile
I assume awk would be better to do multiline processing, but I am not sure how to do it.
Never use the word "pattern" in this context as it is ambiguous. Always use "string" or "regexp" (or in shell "globbing pattern"), whichever it is you really mean. See How do I find the text that matches a pattern? for more about that.
The specific answer you want is:
awk 'f{print;f=0} /regexp/{f=1}' file
or specializing the more general solution of the Nth record after a regexp (idiom "c" below):
awk 'c&&!--c; /regexp/{c=1}' file
The following idioms describe how to select a range of records given a specific regexp to match:
a) Print all records from some regexp:
awk '/regexp/{f=1}f' file
b) Print all records after some regexp:
awk 'f;/regexp/{f=1}' file
c) Print the Nth record after some regexp:
awk 'c&&!--c;/regexp/{c=N}' file
d) Print every record except the Nth record after some regexp:
awk 'c&&!--c{next}/regexp/{c=N}1' file
e) Print the N records after some regexp:
awk 'c&&c--;/regexp/{c=N}' file
f) Print every record except the N records after some regexp:
awk 'c&&c--{next}/regexp/{c=N}1' file
g) Print the N records from some regexp:
awk '/regexp/{c=N}c&&c--' file
I changed the variable name from "f" for "found" to "c" for "count" where
appropriate as that's more expressive of what the variable actually IS.
f is short for found. Its a boolean flag that I'm setting to 1 (true) when I find a string matching the regular expression regexp in the input (/regexp/{f=1}). The other place you see f on its own in each script it's being tested as a condition and when true causes awk to execute its default action of printing the current record. So input records only get output after we see regexp and set f to 1/true.
c && c-- { foo } means "if c is non-zero then decrement it and if it's still non-zero then execute foo" so if c starts at 3 then it'll be decremented to 2 and then foo executed, and on the next input line c is now 2 so it'll be decremented to 1 and then foo executed again, and on the next input line c is now 1 so it'll be decremented to 0 but this time foo will not be executed because 0 is a false condition. We do c && c-- instead of just testing for c-- > 0 so we can't run into a case with a huge input file where c hits zero and continues getting decremented so often it wraps around and becomes positive again.
It's the line after that match that you're interesting in, right? In sed, that could be accomplished like so:
sed -n '/ABC/{n;p}' infile
Alternatively, grep's A option might be what you're looking for.
-A NUM, Print NUM lines of trailing context after matching lines.
For example, given the following input file:
foo
bar
baz
bash
bongo
You could use the following:
$ grep -A 1 "bar" file
bar
baz
$ sed -n '/bar/{n;p}' file
baz
I needed to print ALL lines after the pattern ( ok Ed, REGEX ), so I settled on this one:
sed -n '/pattern/,$p' # prints all lines after ( and including ) the pattern
But since I wanted to print all the lines AFTER ( and exclude the pattern )
sed -n '/pattern/,$p' | tail -n+2 # all lines after first occurrence of pattern
I suppose in your case you can add a head -1 at the end
sed -n '/pattern/,$p' | tail -n+2 | head -1 # prints line after pattern
And I really should include tlwhitec's comment in this answer (since their sed-strict approach is the more elegant than my suggestions):
sed '0,/pattern/d'
The above script deletes every line starting with the first and stopping with (and including) the line that matches the pattern. All lines after that are printed.
awk Version:
awk '/regexp/ { getline; print $0; }' filetosearch
If pattern match, copy next line into the pattern buffer, delete a return, then quit -- side effect is to print.
sed '/pattern/ { N; s/.*\n//; q }; d'
Actually sed -n '/pattern/{n;p}' filename will fail if the pattern match continuous lines:
$ seq 15 |sed -n '/1/{n;p}'
2
11
13
15
The expected answers should be:
2
11
12
13
14
15
My solution is:
$ sed -n -r 'x;/_/{x;p;x};x;/pattern/!s/.*//;/pattern/s/.*/_/;h' filename
For example:
$ seq 15 |sed -n -r 'x;/_/{x;p;x};x;/1/!s/.*//;/1/s/.*/_/;h'
2
11
12
13
14
15
Explains:
x;: at the beginning of each line from input, use x command to exchange the contents in pattern space & hold space.
/_/{x;p;x};: if pattern space, which is the hold space actually, contains _ (this is just a indicator indicating if last line matched the pattern or not), then use x to exchange the actual content of current line to pattern space, use p to print current line, and x to recover this operation.
x: recover the contents in pattern space and hold space.
/pattern/!s/.*//: if current line does NOT match pattern, which means we should NOT print the NEXT following line, then use s/.*// command to delete all contents in pattern space.
/pattern/s/.*/_/: if current line matches pattern, which means we should print the NEXT following line, then we need to set a indicator to tell sed to print NEXT line, so use s/.*/_/ to substitute all contents in pattern space to a _(the second command will use it to judge if last line matched the pattern or not).
h: overwrite the hold space with the contents in pattern space; then, the content in hold space is ^_$ which means current line matches the pattern, or ^$, which means current line does NOT match the pattern.
the fifth step and sixth step can NOT exchange, because after s/.*/_/, the pattern space can NOT match /pattern/, so the s/.*// MUST be executed!
This might work for you (GNU sed):
sed -n ':a;/regexp/{n;h;p;x;ba}' file
Use seds grep-like option -n and if the current line contains the required regexp replace the current line with the next, copy that line to the hold space (HS), print the line, swap the pattern space (PS) for the HS and repeat.
Piping some greps can do it (it runs in POSIX shell and under BusyBox):
cat my-file | grep -A1 my-regexp | grep -v -- '--' | grep -v my-regexp
-v will show non-matching lines
-- is printed by grep to separate each match, so we skip that too
If you just want the next line after a pattern, this sed command will work
sed -n -e '/pattern/{n;p;}'
-n supresses output (quiet mode);
-e denotes a sed command (not required in this case);
/pattern/ is a regex search for lines containing the literal combination of the characters pattern (Use /^pattern$/ for line consisting of only of “pattern”;
n replaces the pattern space with the next line;
p prints;
For example:
seq 10 | sed -n -e '/5/{n;p;}'
Note that the above command will print a single line after every line containing pattern. If you just want the first one use sed -n -e '/pattern/{n;p;q;}'. This is also more efficient as the whole file is not read.
This strictly sed command will print all lines after your pattern.
sed -n '/pattern/,${/pattern/!p;}
Formatted as a sed script this would be:
/pattern/,${
/pattern/!p
}
Here’s a short example:
seq 10 | sed -n '/5/,${/5/!p;}'
/pattern/,$ will select all the lines from pattern to the end of the file.
{} groups the next set of commands (c-like block command)
/pattern/!p; prints lines that doesn’t match pattern. Note that the ; is required in early versions, and some non-GNU, of sed. This turns the instruction into a exclusive range - sed ranges are normally inclusive for both start and end of the range.
To exclude the end of range you could do something like this:
sed -n '/pattern/,/endpattern/{/pattern/!{/endpattern/d;p;}}
/pattern/,/endpattern/{
/pattern/!{
/endpattern/d
p
}
}
/endpattern/d is deleted from the “pattern space” and the script restarts from the top, skipping the p command for that line.
Another pithy example:
seq 10 | sed -n '/5/,/8/{/5/!{/8/d;p}}'
If you have GNU sed you can add the debug switch:
seq 5 | sed -n --debug '/2/,/4/{/2/!{/4/d;p}}'
Output:
SED PROGRAM:
/2/,/4/ {
/2/! {
/4/ d
p
}
}
INPUT: 'STDIN' line 1
PATTERN: 1
COMMAND: /2/,/4/ {
COMMAND: }
END-OF-CYCLE:
INPUT: 'STDIN' line 2
PATTERN: 2
COMMAND: /2/,/4/ {
COMMAND: /2/! {
COMMAND: }
COMMAND: }
END-OF-CYCLE:
INPUT: 'STDIN' line 3
PATTERN: 3
COMMAND: /2/,/4/ {
COMMAND: /2/! {
COMMAND: /4/ d
COMMAND: p
3
COMMAND: }
COMMAND: }
END-OF-CYCLE:
INPUT: 'STDIN' line 4
PATTERN: 4
COMMAND: /2/,/4/ {
COMMAND: /2/! {
COMMAND: /4/ d
END-OF-CYCLE:
INPUT: 'STDIN' line 5
PATTERN: 5
COMMAND: /2/,/4/ {
COMMAND: }
END-OF-CYCLE:
I am new to linux and I am experimenting with basic terminal commands. I found out that I can list all users using compgen -u but what if I only want to display the bottom line outputs ?
Ok lets say the output of compgen -u goes like this:
extra
extra
extra
extra
extra
extra
extra
extra
extra
John
William
Kate
Harold
I can only use grep to find a single text (ex. compgen -u | grep John). But what if I want to use grep to display John as well as all the remaining entries after it ?
sed or awk solution would be easier, but if you can only use grep, then the option --after-context (or -A) might do:
grep -A 5 John file
The drawback is that you need to know the number of lines to display after the matching (or use an arbitrary big number for the rest of the file).
compgen -u | grep -A$(compgen -u| wc -l) John
Explanation:
From man grep
-A NUM, --after-context=NUM
Print NUM lines of trailing context after matching lines. Places a line containing a group separator (described under --group-separator) between
contiguous groups of matches.
grep -A -- print number of rows after pattern
$() -- Execute unix command
compgen -u| wc -l --> Get total number of rows of output of command.
You can use the following one-liner :
n=$( compgen -u | grep -n John | head -1 | cut -d ":" -f 1 ) && compgen -u | tail -n +$n
This finds out the line number for first occurrence of John, and prints everything starting that line.
Let's say we have a string "test123" in a text file.
How do we cut out "test12" only or let's say there is other garbage behind "test123" such as test123x19853 and we want to cut out "test123x"?
I tried with grep -a "test123.\{1,4\}" testasd.txt and so on, but just can't get it right.
I also looked for example, but never found what I'm looking for.
expr:
kent$ x="test123x19853"
kent$ echo $(expr "$x" : '\(test.\{1,4\}\)')
test123x
What you need is -o which print out matched things only:
$ echo "test123x19853"|grep -o "test.\{1,4\}"
test123x
$ echo "test123x19853"|grep -oP "test.{1,4}"
test123x
-o, --only-matching show only the part of a line matching PATTERN
If you are ok with awkthen try following(not this will look for continuous occurrences of alphabets and then continuous occurrences of digits, didn't limit it to 4 or 5).
echo "test123x19853" | awk 'match($0,/[a-zA-Z]+[0-9]+/){print substr($0,RSTART,RLENGTH)}'
In case you want to look for only 1 to 4 digits after 1st continuous occurrence of alphabets then try following(my awk is old version so using --re-interval you could remove it in case you have latest version of ittoo).
echo "test123x19853" | awk --re-interval 'match($0,/[a-zA-Z]+[0-9]{1,4}/){print substr($0,RSTART,RLENGTH)}'
I have a file A with 100 words in it separated by new lines. I would like to search file B to see if ANY of the words in file A occur in it.
I tried the following but does not work to me:
grep -F A B
You need to use the option -f:
$ grep -f A B
The option -F does a fixed string search where as -f is for specifying a file of patterns. You may want both if the file only contains fixed strings and not regexps.
$ grep -Ff A B
You may also want the -w option for matching whole words only:
$ grep -wFf A B
Read man grep for a description of all the possible arguments and what they do.
To find a very long list of words in big files, it can be more efficient to use egrep:
remove the last \n of A
$ tr '\n' '|' < A > A_regex
$ egrep -f A_regex B
Suppose I write a grep query to find out the occurrence of a method call on an object like this:
// might not be accurate, but irrelevant
grep -nr "[[:alnum:]]\.[[:alnum:]](.*)" .
This would give many results. How to find out how many such results are obtained?
What about using | wc -l to count the number of result lines?
What about
man grep | grep "count"
It outputs
-c, --count
Suppress normal output; instead print a count of matching lines for each input file. [...]
Previous answers are OK, I just want to put it into command line instructions in order to have copy-paste versions (from explicit to simplest) for the future:
grep --count "PATTERN" FILE
Is exactly the same as:
grep -c "PATTERN" FILE
And it is equivalent to:
grep "PATTERN" FILE | wc -l
As a bonus, below i give you a version where a file with a list of patterns is used.
grep -count --file=PATTERNFILE FILE
or simply
grep -cf PATTERNFILE FILE