Hi,

I am using awk to show the comments in a file like this ....
this is a /* comment on */ one line and
this is /* also on one */ line.

#find the lines which start with "/* and end with "*/"
#remove the "/*" and "*/" from output
awk -F[\/][\*] '{print $2}' | awk -F[\*][\/] '{print $1}' file.txt

This works fine if the comment is on one line but what if the person is long winded and the comments go for several lines like this .....
this is a /* comment which
takes up several lines
in the file. */

How do you get awk or sed to continue on down past the \n ?

(1)
Since the default for RS (the record separator is newline, is you change it to some non existent character ..

(2)
Possible pseude code for awk.
BEGIN {
InCommentFlag = 0
}
{
For(Ix=0;Ix<Length($0);Ix++) {
If (InCommentFlag == 1) {
If (data is "*/") InCommentFlag = 0
Else {
If Data is "/*"
InCommentFlag = 1
Else
Write the byte.
}
)
}
END {
}

Thanks AnanthaP

Unfortunately, the \n can't be changed to something else as the lines will be counted.

#find the lines which start with "/* and end with "*/"
#remove the "/*" and "*/" from output
cat /home/file.txt |grep -e '[\/][\*]\(.*\)[\*][\/]' | \
awk -F[\/][\*] '{print $2}' | awk -F[\*][\/] '{print $1}' > file1.txt

#count the number of lines which start with "/*" and end with "*/"
cat /home/file1.txt |wc -l > file2.txt

#count the number of words from those lines.
cat /home/file1.txt |wc -w >> file2.txt

#count the number of unique words from those lines.
cat /home/file1.txt | tr ' ' '\012' |sort | uniq |wc -w >> file2.txt