grepping for multi-line output
 

i can't get any reference about this online nor with the man page, so I need some tips here.

my situation;

- i have a file which contains plain text records with each record consisting of 1 to 4 lines. how do i grep (or whatever tool) the record number and print all the lines related to that record? each record is separated by lines made up of dashes. ie:

------------------------------------------------------------
yyyymmdd blahsdfdf dkfdkflasjfljdflj recordnum
blah blah blah
blah blah blah yada yada
------------------------------------------------------------

i might be using the wrong tool (grep and awk) or what?

thanks.

Use awk.

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...threadid=41050