Damien Lespiau

For reference for my future self, a few handy sed commands. Let’s consider this file:

$ cat test-sed
First line
Second line
--
Another line
Last line

We can extract the lines from the start of the file to the marker by deleting the rest:

$ sed '/--/,$d' test-sed 
First line
Second line

a,b is the range the command, here d(elete), applies to. a and b can be, among others, line numbers, regular expressions or $ for end of the file. We can also extract the lines from the marker to the end of the file with:

$ sed -n '/--/,$p' test-sed 
--
Another line
Last line

This one is slightly more complicated. By default sed spits all the lines it receives as input, '-n' is there to tell sed not to do that. The rest of the expression is to p(rint) the lines between -- and the end of the file.

That’s all folks!