grep a number of lines in Solaris

Skrynesaver

Hi all,
I need to find the line before a line in output on a Solaris box, now with gnu grep I can

grep -1<pattern> <file>|head -1

Unfortunately this has to work in other environments so I can't just install GNU grep . how would I achieve the same effect on a vanilla Solaris box?

Skrynesaver

Probably not the most efficient solution, by lots but I found a way to do it

...|sed -n '1,/pattern/ p'|tail -2|head -1

niallb

You'll more than likely have perl.
Wouldn't that give you more options?

You will have 'ex'.
I had to use this for some record munging on an archaeological AIX install once.

Try this:
ex -s -R -c '/<pattern>/-1|q' <filename>

Skrynesaver

Hi Niall,

vi proves it's worth again

While perl is a given on these boxes, I was trying to keep it a shell script, it's sort of grown from a 5 line one off solution to a generic solution (as they do). however it's for parsing and modifying an ldap directory so if I was to use perl I'd have a system(ldapsearch ....) in a loop or I'd have to use Net::LDAP and insist on them installing the module.