Famous Sed One-Liners Explained, Part I: File Spacing, Numbering and Text Conversion and Substitution

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Erik Permalink
July 29, 2009, 17:15

This is one that was driving me crazy - couldn't find it anywhere on the net:

DELETE ALL LINES BETWEEN TWO MARKER PATTERNS (but not the markers themselves):

e.g. in a hosts file

== /etc/hosts ==

192.168.1.2 host1
192.168.1.3 host2

### START ###
#delete
192.168.1.4 host3 #delete
192.168.1.5 host4 #delete
#delete
### END ###

192.168.1.6 host5

=============================

The money:

sed -i -e '1,/^### START ###/!{ /^### END ###/,/^### START ###/!d; }' /etc/hosts

I have no idea how it works, but it does. Now your markers are preserved for you to insert other stuff with your funky automation scripts.

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