grep -E drives me crazy

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

Hi there,

I'm new here. I registered my self today with this board because I hope to get some help before I'll become a slavering maniac.
I'm really desperate, since I'm trying for hours(really!) to let grep search a pattern that goes about 2 lines.
The pattern is as follows:
Handle 0x000xxxxxxx
Memory Module Information

I tried it as follows:
grep -i -E 'handle .*memory module information' -A 8

I also did that:
grep -i -E 'handle .*memory module information/m' -A 8

and that:
grep -i -E '^handle .*[\n]memory module information' -A 8

For the last 3 and a half hours I read so many pages about egrep, but nothing answers my question. It simply doesn't work.

Help me please (with sugar on top)

Best regards
darkelf

2

It's better to post your inputfile and the desired output instead of what you've done wrong.

Regards

3

Ahh, OK
The "inputfile" is the output of dmidecode. This output is fed into grep with a pipe.
e.g.

dmidecode | grep xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

The desired output is for instance:

Handle 0x0007, DMI type 6, 12 bytes
Memory Module Information
Socket Designation: A1
Bank Connections: 2
Current Speed: Unknown
Type: Other
Installed Size: 2048 MB (Single-bank Connection)
Enabled Size: 2048 MB (Single-bank Connection)
Error Status: OK

But I also would like to know, how newlines can be handled with grep (egrep).

Thank you.

Best regards
darkelf

4

try sed - grep is not easy spanning line boundaries:

dimdecode | \
sed -n '/Handle 0x000xxxxxxx/,/Memory Module Information/p'  > outputfile
5

That was what I thought myself at first, but the problem is, that sed gives me also lines like that:

Handle 0x0025, DMI type 32, 11 bytes
System Boot Information
Status: No errors detected

and that is not what I want.
I want solely lines that start with a handel information like the one above followed by "Memory Module Information" and the next 8 lines that follow up.

But nevertheless, thanks for your answers so far.

Best regards
darkelf

OK, now i've found out, that

dmidecode | grep -i 'memory module information' -A 8 -B 1

gives the desired output, but the question remains: How to deal with newlines when grep is used.

6

try this
grep -i -E '(^handle|memory module information)' -A 8

7

Thank you very much, but that doesn't work either. It produces the same output as described above. That means it will show lines like:

  Handle 0x0025, DMI type 32, 11 bytes  System Boot Information  Status: No errors detected

because it starts with "handle". I want only output if "handle" will be followed by "memory module information" in the next line. I've got some working code, but it's AWK and that's a language I don't know even a bit, so I'm looking for the same thing with grep or sed. This is it in awk:

 dmidecode | awk -v RS='\n\n' '/Memory Module Information/'

Credits for the code to "ModestUser" from sidux-Forum. After all it's quite similar to

 grep -i 'memory module information' -A 8 -B 1

which works pretty well, but doesn't answer my question. Best regards darkelf