Around

Note: modern "grep" has flags for printing lines before and after the match. Search for "context" in the man/info pages.

This is just a simple Perl/sed ( get Perl from Skunkware if you don't already have it) program that prints the text "around" a pattern. I call it "around", and you'd use it like this:

# around tony /etc/passwd
audit:x:79:17:Audit administrator:/tcb/files/audit:
apl:x:201:50::/usr/books:/bin/sh
ftp:x:20:50:anonymous ftp account:/usr/internet/ip/0.0.0.0/sco_ftp:/bin/sh
kate:x:202:50::/usr/kate:/bin/sh
tony:x:203:50::/usr/tony:/bin/sh
books:x:204:50::/usr/books:/bin/sh
testuv:x:205:50::/usr/testuv:/bin/sh
fred:x:206:50::/usr/fred:/bin/sh
john:x:207:50::/usr/john:/bin/sh
# 
 

As you can see, it prints the 4 lines before and the 4 lines after "tony". If you understand regex patterns, you can also use it that way. As presented here, this only searches one file; it wouldn't be very hard to change this to read from any number of files listed on the command line, but it would be more complicated, and I wanted to leave this very easy to understand for non-programmers. It could also easily take an argument that would specify how many lines to show before and after; again, I left that out to keep it simple.

I think it's written simply enough that anyone should be able to modify it if they need it to print more or less. Note that the very first line must point at wherever your Perl binary lives.

This isn't particularly fast, efficient or elegant. If you understand that by looking at it, then you are surely capable of writing a better version yourself, and wouldn't need this. This is for people who don't write their own programs or are just starting to: it's intended to be easy to understand, not great programming.

Non-programmers should note that using patterns that match more than one line can easily produce duplicate lines of output. For example, "around 'tony|kate' /etc/passwd" will list lines before and after "kate", and then the lines before and after "tony". That could be confusing if you aren't expecting it.

#!/usr/local/bin/perl
$search=shift;
$file=shift;
$line=0;
open(FILE,$file) or die "Can't open $file";
while (<FILE>) {
        $line++;
        if (/$search/o) {
                $start= $line -4;
                $start=1 if $start < 1;
                $end = $line +4;
                $cmd="/bin/sed -n $start,${end}p $file";
                print qx/$cmd/;
        }
}

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