Bashscripts.org

Hello everyone. I need a bash script that can delete specific lines from text file.
For example i have a text file that contains the following lines:

and i want this script to delete the lines from "X starts here" to "X ends here" by script.sh delete X
10x in advance

i kind of understand what you are wanting... but i'm not real sure on the format for the text file you are trying to parse... a little more descriptive information would be appreciated

Well.... to be honest this sounds alot like homework.......

But.... I can give you hints on how I would do it......
If your wanting to delete a section of text by LINE number.......... then you need the starting line number to delete and the ending line number to delete... this would be in the form of ./script.sh 1 10 giving you two inputs for the script $1 and $2.

Using the first number.... create a new variable... "topoffile" with topoffile=`$1 - 1`
Now........ you can put the top part of your file into another file........... head $topoffile > NEWFILENAME

Using the second input number you can get the bottom part of your file......... bottomoffile=`$2 +1`
Now you can put the bottom part into your newfile...... tail $bottomoffile >> NEWFILENAME

if you wanted to overwrite your existing file with the new file.......... mv NEWFILENAME oldfilename

I didn't write the script for you.......... but you can play with what I gave you and probably not have too hard a time from this.........

jbsnake might have a better solution up his sleeve.......... you never know......

For this specific issue:

Sed is the bestest command ever! Check it out. I added some lines to your example just to demonstrate how neatly sed snips out the lines that you want to remove:



Is that what you were looking for?

-jeo