[ILUG] text flow tools

[Paul Jakma]

On Wed, 27 Jul 2005, Paul Biggar wrote:

> Folks,
>
> grep can find two words one after the other by doing 'grep "word1
> word2"'. Does anybody know a way of making this return a case where
> word1 is at the end of one line, and word2 is at the start of the
> next.

Using GNU AWK, something vaguely like (untested):

BEGIN {
 	latch = 0;
}

/word1$/ {
 	line1 = $0;
 	latch = 1;
 	getline;
}

latch == 1 {
 	if ($1 == "word1")
 		print line1,$0;
 	latch = 0;
}

You can of course replace all \n's in the above with spaces and 
enclose it with ' to run it as a gawk commandline script. The BEGIN 
section is unneccesary, gawk initialises variables to 0 on first use, 
but it's good practice to explicitely initialise global's in the 
first BEGIN section, prior to all usage, ime.

regards,
-- 
Paul Jakma	paul at clubi.ie	paul at jakma.org	Key ID: 64A2FF6A
Fortune:
The difference between reality and unreality is that reality has so
little to recommend it.
 		-- Allan Sherman