I have several blocks of text between regular intervals that I am trying to use shell to parse into separate files. The file resembles this format:
<Line delimiter>
The lines of text to extract
<Line delimiter>
Other lines that are to be extracted but
also have an unpredictable length
<Line delimiter>
...
...
<Line delimiter>
and so forth
I was attempting a Split command and grepping between lines as:
for line in $(grep -n 'Line Delimiter' target.txt | cut -d ':' -f 1); do split -l $line target.txt ; done
With also, this with a head | tail pipe as what appeared to be one of the eloquent solutions seen in this example. I have searched it out a little more, with a few other attempts but I feel like this should be relatively easy but accomplishing this feat for more than 1 iteration is proving difficult. Any help thanks in advance.
trivial example hopefully be helpful
$ cat input.txt
<Line delimiter>
The lines of text to extract
<Line delimiter>
Other lines that are to be extracted but
also have an unpredictable length
<Line delimiter>
these should also go...
into another file ...
<Line delimiter>
and so forth
$
$ #repeat the split as many times as the match is made
$ csplit -q input.txt '/<Line delimiter>/' '{*}'
$
$ # file xx00 is empty as the first occurence of <Line delimiter> is line 1
$ cat xx01
<Line delimiter>
The lines of text to extract
$ cat xx02
<Line delimiter>
Other lines that are to be extracted but
also have an unpredictable length
$ cat xx03
<Line delimiter>
these should also go...
into another file ...
$ cat xx04
<Line delimiter>
and so forth
check out the csplit manpage for additional info.