how to delete two consecutive lines from the file

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

Hi guys
I am deleting a unique line from the file and also need to remove the line above it which is NOT unique and servers as a record separator. Here is an example:

#
  101   803E     823F     8240
#
  102   755f     4F2A     4F2B
#
  290   747D     0926     0927
#
  999   8123     813E     8155
#
  206   807C     803F     8237

Deleting a unique line is not a problem, but I cannot figure out how to remove the line above it (starts with # ...)
May be someone already handle similar problem.
Thanks a lot for advice

2

For this, sed is a nice tool:

sed '
  :loop
  $b
  N
  /\nYOUR_PATTERN/d
  P
  s/.*\n//
  b loop
 ' infile >outfile

If at end of file, branch to <no_tag>, which is to end of script, print and exit (some sed are funny with N at EOF). Get a second line into the buffer. If YOUR_PATTERN is the second line, delete both. Otherwise, spit out the first line, delete it and go back to 'loop' to get another line.

In vi, this is an ex ':' global command:

:g/YOUR_PATTERN/.-1,.d
3

DGPickett,
thanks for advice, but for some reason it down not remove the requested lines :frowning:

This is before the change:

$ grep " 2001   8232     8232     8232" firmexbytes.dta.new 
 2001   8232     8232     8232
$

Here is the script:

$ sed '
> :loop
> $b
> N
> /\n"2001   8232     8232     8232"/d
> P
> s/.*\n//
> b loop
> ' firmexbytes.dta.new > firmexbytes.dta.del

This is after the script was run:

$ grep " 2001   8232     8232     8232" firmexbytes.dta.del
 2001   8232     8232     8232
$
4

You missed some quoting,m and now are looking for it and the double quotes (literally because you are in single quotes). I do sed scripts inline in single quotes, but temporrily close the single quoting and go to double to access a shell provide env var, then close the double and restart the single quoting. If you put in only literals, the outer single quotes are sufficient.

Second, the pattern must have any leading white space characters after \n.

5

You can also try:

tac file|awk '/PATTERN/{getline;next}' |tac
6

I wonder what the overhead is for tac? VM, seek, mmap()? Since it works on pipes, it is probably VM intensive! Solaris has "tail -r".