hey, could some1 help me with this? i am trying to get a word count of lines between lines starting with a letter. the file is like this: AUS_LO 109D 265C AUS_HO 1078D 1093C AUS_PO so a count of lines from AUS_LO to AUS_HO and count between AUS_HO and AUS_PO. any help would be really apreciated.

# should be 4 sed -n "/AUS_LO/,/AUS_HO/p" data.file|wc -w # should be 7 sed -n "/AUS_LO/,/AUS_PO/p" data.file|wc -w

thanks for replying, the names aus_lo and aus_po change all the time, wat the file is is a list of changes between two folders and the numbers are the line number of the changes. is there anyway to say find numbers between letters? like sed -n "/[a-z]/,/[a-z]/p" data.file|wc -w

I'm not understanding your question, but it looks like you want to do more processing on data found within a range. sed doesn't do if comparisons well. awk also supports range patterns. The sed example could be rewritten this way: awk '$1 ~ /AUS_LO/ , $1 ~ /AUS_HO/' data.file|wc -w If you wanted to act on each line within the range, you could do something like this: awk '$1 ~ /AUS_LO/ , $1 ~ /AUS_HO/ { print "do something" } ' data.file

the file is a list of changes in files, a diff is used to check between 2 folders, the results come back word /numbers/ word e.g. aus 123c1 546d1 bel 123c1 che 123c2 was wondering is there any way to get the amount of changes between the first word and the second so the output would be aus 2 bel 1 che 1

Assuming that if the first character is alpha it's a file name and if the first character is integer, it's a change, you can set up a break point report using awk - nawk in my case since I'm using Solaris: #!/bin/ksh nawk ' BEGIN { cnter=0 } { if ($0 ~ /^[a-zA-Z]+/) { # print the number of changes if past first line if (NR > 1) { print cnter cnter=0 } print $0 continue } if ($0 ~ /^[1-9]+/) cnter++ } END { print cnter } ' datafile.txt # end script I also assume the file ends with a change

thats brill, works very well, thanks for your help