Hi,

Im trying to print all the lines before the matching lines.

Conditions i have are:
1. Dont know how many lines i have to print. So cant use grep -B option :-(
2. should use variable to store the pattern.

I tried using sed, But sed doesnot recognize variable as it needs string as pattern.

Please help me.

Thanks In advance :-)

Without an actual example of the in and output you want/need I'm forced to give a general answer. This should work:

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Thanku very much for the answer. It has solved my Issue. It was very helpful..

Hi Druuna,

Thanks for the code, But the code is printing even the matching pattern.

Ex:
abc1.txt
rgc1.txt
dfc1.txt
vdc1.txt
adf1.txt
drc1.txt
pres.txt

I want it to print all the lines before the pattern.

SEARCHSTRING="vdc1.txt"
sed -n "1,/${SEARCHSTRING}/p" infile


I want to print:
abc1.txt
rgc1.txt
dfc1.txt


Can you please help me.

Thanks in advance..

Do you understand how that code works?---If so, you can modify it to do what you need.

The variation is to tell sed to print everything, but to DELETE all lines in a range---e.g.:

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Minor correction to pixellany's code:

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OOPS---yes: search strings inside the //, line numbers and things like end of file ($) outside

Please use ***[code][/code] tags*** around your code and data, to preserve formatting and to improve readability. Please do not use quote tags, bolding, colors, or other fancy formatting.


Another option in sed is to use a nested command and eliminate that last, unwanted line.

(Since environment variables are generally all upper-case, it's good practice to keep your own user variables in lower-case or mixed-case to help differentiate them.)


Here are a few useful sed references:
http://www.grymoire.com/Unix/Sed.html
http://sed.sourceforge.net/grabbag/
http://sed.sourceforge.net/sedfaq.html
http://sed.sourceforge.net/sed1line.txt


Yet another option is to use ed, which has a useful negative line indexing ability:
It will fail if the matching string occurs on the first line, however.

Notice that I also added a change to the variable. If the string happens to contain a "/", then it will conflict with the matching delimiter. The "${SEARCHSTRING//\//\/}" parameter substitution will add backslashes to any that exist, making it safe for all strings.

How to use ed:
http://wiki.bash-hackers.org/howto/edit-ed
http://snap.nlc.dcccd.edu/learn/nlc/ed.html
(also read the info page)