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From: ok@quintus.UUCP (Richard A. O'Keefe)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions,comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: A little help with SED please
Message-ID: <935@cresswell.quintus.UUCP>
Date: 6 May 88 02:42:00 GMT
References: <762@pttesac.UUCP> <88@lakart.UUCP>
Distribution: na
Organization: Quintus Computer Systems, Mountain View, CA
Lines: 38

From article <762@pttesac.UUCP>, by robert@pttesac.UUCP (Robert Rodriguez):
> In article <1988Apr26.011145.27914@lsuc.uucp> dave@lsuc.UUCP (David Sherman) writes:
>>murillo@boulder.Colorado.EDU (Rodrigo Murillo) writes:
>>>I need an sed line (or some gory pipeline) to extract the data between
>>>BEGIN and END.
>>[more stuff on "awk" deleted]
> I'm surprised nobody mentioned csplit.  It's perfect for this stuff,
> as the man page says, csplit is a context splitter.
> csplit -s -k foo /BEGIN/+1 /END/-1

There is a very good reason why nobody mentioned csplit: it doesn't do the
job.  The original poster had a file
	junk0
	BEGIN
	data1
	END
	junk1
	...
	junkn
	BEGIN
	datan
	END
	junk
and wanted all the "data" segments.  When the csplit command is corrected
to end with /END/ rather than /END/-1, it will create three files:
    xx00:
	junk0
	BEGIN
    xx01:
	data1
    xx02:
	END
	junk1
	...
	END
	junk
This is not at all what was wanted!  csplit has some rather unpleasant
restrictions, like not being able to create more than 99 (or is it 100?
the manual page is unclear) output files.