Advanced grep unix - unix

Question

Usually grep command is used to display the line contaning the specified pattern. Is there any way to display n lines before and after the line which contains the specified pattern?
Can this will be achieved using awk?

Answer 1

Yes, use
grep -B num1 -A num2
to include num1 lines of context before the match, and num2 lines of context after the match.
EDIT:
Seems the OP is using AIX. This has a different set of options which doesn't include -B and -A
this link describes grep on AIX 4.3 (it doesn't look promising)
Matt's perl script might be a better solution.

Answer 2

Here is what I usually do on AIX:
before=2 << The number of lines to be shown Before >>
after=2 << The number of lines to be shown After >>
grep -n <pattern> <filename> | cut -d':' -f1 | xargs -n1 -I % awk "NR<=%+$after && NR>=%-$before" <filename>
If you do not want the extra 2 varialbles you can always use it an a one line:
grep -n <pattern> <filename> | cut -d':' -f1 | xargs -n1 -I % awk 'NR<=%+<<after>> && NR>=%-<<before>>' <filename>
Suppose I have a pattern 'stack' and the filename is flow.txt
I want 2 lines before and 3 lines after. The the command will be like:
grep -n 'stack' flow.txt | cut -d':' -f1 | xargs -n1 -I % awk 'NR<=%+3 && NR>=%-2' flow.txt
I want 2 lines before and only - the the command will be like:
grep -n 'stack' flow.txt | cut -d':' -f1 | xargs -n1 -I % awk 'NR<=% && NR>=%-2' flow.txt
I want 3 lines after and only - the the command will be like:
grep -n 'stack' flow.txt | cut -d':' -f1 | xargs -n1 -I % awk 'NR<=%+3 && NR>=%' flow.txt
Multiple Files - change it for Awk & grep. From above for the pattern 'stack' with the filename is flow.* - 2 lines before and 3 lines after. The the command will be like:
awk 'BEGIN {
before=1; after=3; pattern="stack";
i=0; hold[before]=""; afterprints=0}
{
#Print the lines from the previous Match
if (afterprints > 0)
{
print FILENAME ":" FNR ":" $0
afterprints-- #keep a track of the lines to print after - this can be reset if a match is found
if (afterprints == 0) print "---"
}
#Look for the pattern in current line
if ( match($0, pattern) > 0 )
{
# print the lines in the hold round robin buffer from the current line to line-1
# if (before >0) => user wants lines before avoid divide by 0 in %
# and afterprints => 0 - we have not printed the line already
for(j=i; j < i+before && before > 0 && afterprints == 0 ; j++)
print hold[j%before]
if (afterprints == 0) # print the line if we have not printed the line already
print FILENAME ":" FNR ":" $0
afterprints=after
}
if (before > 0) # Store the lines in the round robin hold buffer
{ hold[i]=FILENAME ":" FNR ":" $0
i=(i+1)%before }
}' flow.*

Answer 3

From the tags, it's likely that the system has a grep that may not support providing context (Solaris is one system that doesn't and I can't remember about AIX). If that is the case, there's a perl script that may help at http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/jsp/descFile.jsp?url=descAll/cgrep__context_grep.

Answer 4

If you have sed you could use this shell script
BEFORE=2
AFTER=3
FILE=file.txt
PATTERN=pattern
for i in $(grep -n $PATTERN $FILE | sed -e 's/\:.*//')
do head -n $(($AFTER+$i)) $FILE | tail -n $(($AFTER+$BEFORE+1))
done
What it does is, grep -n prefixes each match with the line it was found at, the sed strips all but the line it was found at. Then you use head to get the lines up to the line it was found on plus an additional $AFTER lines. That's then piped to tail to just get $BEFORE + $AFTER + 1 lines (that is, your matching line plus the number of lines before and after)

Answer 5

Sure there is (from the grep man page):
-B NUM, --before-context=NUM
Print NUM lines of leading context before matching lines.
Places a line containing a group separator (--) between
contiguous groups of matches. With the -o or --only-matching
option, this has no effect and a warning is given.
-A NUM, --after-context=NUM
Print NUM lines of trailing context after matching lines.
Places a line containing a group separator (--) between
contiguous groups of matches. With the -o or --only-matching
option, this has no effect and a warning is given.
and if you want the same amount of lines before AND after the match, use:
-C NUM, -NUM, --context=NUM
Print NUM lines of output context. Places a line containing a
group separator (--) between contiguous groups of matches. With
the -o or --only-matching option, this has no effect and a
warning is given.

Answer 6

you can use awk
awk 'BEGIN{t=4}
c--&&c>=0
/pattern/{ c=t; for(i=NR;i<NR+t;i++)print a[i%t] }
{ a[NR%t]=$0}
' file
output
$ more file
1
2
3
4
5
pattern
6
7
8
9
10
11
$ ./shell.sh
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9