in reply to extract (a range of) numbered lines from a file

sed -e '10,15p;4p;s/.*//' file | awk '!/^$/{print $0}' somefile

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somefile shouldn't be there, right?

Removing lines can be done with d in sed, so you can shorten it to 

sed -e '10,15p;4p;d' | awk ...

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but there's also the -n switch for sed which says "don't print", so we can get 

sed -ne '10,15p;5p' | awk ...

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and we can remove emtpy lines in sed easily with /^$/d which removes the need to call awk: 

sed -ne '/^$/d;10,15p;4p' file

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($q=q:Sq=~/;[c](.)(.)/;chr(-||-|5+lengthSq)`"S|oS2"`map{chr |+ord
}map{substrSq`S_+|`|}3E|-|`7**2-3:)=~y+S|`+$1,++print+eval$q,q,a,

[download]

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re^2: extract (a range of) numbered lines from a file
by shmem (Chancellor) on Sep 21, 2016 at 17:45 UTC
    somefile shouldn't be there, right?

    Right. And I completely forgot about -n which eliminates the call to awk ;-) So all that's necesary is: 

    sed -ne '10,15p;5p' file

    [download]
    perl -le'print map{pack c,($-++?1:13)+ord}split//,ESEL'
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[d/l]
[select]
      No, that's not the same. It still outputs the empty lines.

      ($q=q:Sq=~/;[c](.)(.)/;chr(-||-|5+lengthSq)`"S|oS2"`map{chr |+ord
}map{substrSq`S_+|`|}3E|-|`7**2-3:)=~y+S|`+$1,++print+eval$q,q,a,

      [download]
[reply]
[d/l]

        Well, mine doesn't, for sure. Transcript: 

        qwurx [shmem] ~> perl -le 'print "line $_" for 1..15' >| linenumber.tx
+t
qwurx [shmem] ~> sed -ne '10,15p;5p' linenumber.txt
line 5
line 10
line 11
line 12
line 13
line 14
line 15
qwurx [shmem] ~> which sed
/bin/sed
qwurx [shmem] ~> dpkg -S `which sed`
sed: /bin/sed
qwurx [shmem] ~> dpkg -l sed
Desired=Unknown/Install/Remove/Purge/Hold
| Status=Not/Inst/Conf-files/Unpacked/halF-conf/Half-inst/trig-aWait/T
+rig-pend
|/ Err?=(none)/Reinst-required (Status,Err: uppercase=bad)
||/ Name            Version      Architecture Description
+++-===============-============-============-========================
+============
ii  sed             4.2.2-4+b1   amd64        The GNU sed stream edito
+r

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        Show evidence of yours.

        In defence of my oh-so-cool perl snippet -

        • l is less typing than sed -ne
        • on subsequent calls with the same file, I need not specify the file as argument
        • it is the one script which needed a CHECK block

        And that's pretty much all about that. If I were better at typing, two of them three arguments would be quite pointless ;-)

        perl -le'print map{pack c,($-++?1:13)+ord}split//,ESEL'
[reply]
[d/l]
[select]

In Section Cool Uses for Perl