i have a question regarding file searching/parsing within linux.
i have been looking through some log files and i have several strings that i am looking for. i know that i could cat the files and pipe to grep, but the lines are generally next to each other. it would be much easier if i could cat the file, search for a string (grep etc.) and then have it begin at line of the text i searched for.

i have looked at man pages and tutorials, but haven't found a solution. anyone out there have any insight?

q.

It's not totally clear what you want to do...

It sounds like you want to have an output which begins with the first matching line and then continues to the end of the file.

Try this:
Suppose you want to search on the pattern "stuff" and then print that line and everything after:

sed -n '/stuff/,$p' filename

This is using an "address range" in sed---ie print everything from the line containing "stuff" up to the end of the file ($).

works well. thanks for the help.

is there any way that i can apply this to something like dmesg (tried, but sed expects a file name) or am i limited to only files?

q.

You can pipe the output of something into any command that expects an input stream.

eg:
dmesg|grep <pattern>
dmesg|sed '<expression>'

A good place to start learning this stuff is "Bash Guide for Beginners", by Machtelt Garrels. Free at http://tldp.org

Also really good tutorials here:
http://www.grymoire.com/Unix/

right, i understand that i can pipe the output of dmesg into grep and use regex for my filtering. that isn't an issue.

as you have pointed out, i can use sed to search through a file from an occurrence through the eof.
my question was if that can be duplicated when i search through something like dmesg rather than through a local file. if not, it is fine; i can simply parse through everything by hand.

for those who are familiar with cisco ios commands, i am trying to accomplish something similar to

dmesg | begin <string>

(the "| begin" is a command in ios which searches through the output for the first instance of <string>. when <string> is encountered, it will show the line including <string> and then will continue to display the rest of the output as normal).

q.