Printing text between line numbers or patterns

We may require to print a certain section of text lines, based on conditions such as a range of line numbers, and a range matched by a start and end pattern. Let's see how to do it.

Getting ready

We can use utilities such as awk, grep, and sed to perform the printing of a section based on conditions. Still, I found awk to be the simplest one to understand. Let's do it using awk.

How to do it...

1. To print the lines of a text in a range of line numbers, M to N, use the following syntax:

   $ awk 'NR==M, NR==N' filename
   

   Or, it can take the stdin input as follows:

   $ cat filename | awk 'NR==M, NR==N'
   

2. Replace M and N with numbers as follows:

   $ seq 100 | awk 'NR==4,NR==6'
   4
   5
   6
   

3. To print the lines of a text in a section with start_pattern and end_pattern, use the following syntax:

   $ awk '/start_pattern/, /end _pattern/' filename
   

   For example:

   $ cat section.txt 
   line with pattern1 
   line with pattern2 
   line with pattern3 
   line end with pattern4 
   line with pattern5...