On Wed, 2009-06-10 at 12:01 -0700, nate wrote: > Joseph L. Casale wrote: > > > if the text indented beneath it has "D:", then do the same and extract > > "SNAPSHOT ID" if and only if "E:" follows? > > If the line counts are constant you could do the reverse: > > grep -B 3 "\(E:\|D:\)" input.txt | grep Shadow And being inherently lazy, I would do grep -B 3 "\([ED]:\)" input.txt ...<whatever else> > > Which would show the 3 lines above a line that has E:\ or D:\ and > then only display the lines with the word Shadow. > > nate > <snip> -- Bill