grep within grep

[realtest]

Hi,

I need to kind of grep within grep. My input file would be something like:

blah blah
hello 2545
blah blah
blah blah
blah blah
hello 9008
blah blah
blah blah
blah blah
MY PATTERN
blah blah
blah blah
blah blah

and I need to find the first occurrence of hello before MY PATTERN (hello 9008 in this case), so the output should be:

hello 9008
MY PATTERN

How can I do this?

Thanks,

[tyho]

I wouldn't use grep for this, since grep does line matching only... You could write a script which reads the file and checks every line for the hello pattern. If it matches, it saves the line in a variable. Then, it checks for your MY PATTERN, if it matches, it appends the MY PATTERN line to the variable you saved the previous match in. Sounds complicated, but it's actually pretty easy..

That's probably not the easiest way, but it works.

Do you know anything about perl? You can write a bash script, too, but with perl it's very easy!

[kakariko81280]

Hi there,

You can pipe the output of one grep into another.

chris@angua:~$ cat test.txt 
blah blah
hello 2545
blah blah
blah blah
blah blah
hello 9008
blah blah
blah blah
blah blah
MY PATTERN
blah blah
blah blah
blah blah
chris@angua:~$ grep test.txt -e ^hello -e "MY PATTERN" | grep -B 1 "MY PATTERN"
hello 9008
MY PATTERN

Using several -e switches lets you match several patterns, in this case the lines starting "hello" and the lines with "MY PATTERN" in them. The -B flag gives extra lines of context, in this case one line backwards.

You may get strange effects if you have several instances of your pattern without hello lines in between, but whether that is an actual problem depends on what you are trying to do.

Let us know how you get on

[tyho]

The -B flag gives extra lines of context, in this case one line backwards.

I didn't know the -B flag... this of course makes it much easier. you never stop learning

[realtest]

It worked GREAT! I didn't know about the -e switch. That's exactly what I wanted to do.

Thank you very much