I want to extract certain lines of a file between separators such as: ------ aaabbbb ------ aaaaa xxxxxx ------ xxxxx What utility (other than awk or perl) would help me to accomplish this task? Thanks!

Are you looking to basically get everything in the file EXCEPT the: ------ ? If so are all the ------ the same size? If not, how are you looking/going to specify which portion you want to extract?

Yes, and the separators are all the same size. However, there are 2 or 3 or 4 lines of data that I need between the separators in the file. ex: ------ aaaa bbbb ------ xxxxxxx yyyyyyy zzzzzzz ------- jjjjjjj kkkkkkk ------- llllll llllll llllll

is this different than excluding the separating lines, aaaa bbbb xxxxxxx yyyyyyy zzzzzzz jjjjjjj ....

Have you tried grep? I'm on a windows system (without grep) so, I can't test and verify if my systax is correct but this should be close. grep -v /regex pattern for line seperator/ file.txt The -v option finds all lines that don't match the pattern. man page for grep http://unixhelp.ed.ac.uk/CGI/man-cgi?grep

I ran a couple tests and egrep would be better since it has better support for regex's. Assuming the line seperator is a row of dashes, this egrep command will extract everything else and send it to a file. egrep -v '^\-+$' file1.txt > file2.txt If your line seporator is something else, we'll need to modify the regex.

After another test I discovered that you don't need to escape the dash in the regex. grep didn't like the dash in the regex but egrep didn't care. here's the cleaner rexeg: '^-+$'