Although there are better solutions as has already been suggested above, here is a quick script I just wrote to output 5 lines either side a line number you specify.
Just give it two arguments on the command line when you run it. 1. A line number you want to display, and 2. the file you want to display the line number from.
eg. lnb.pl 14 testfile.txt
This will display lines 9 through to 19 (5 either side of 14) from file testfile.txt
Enjoy!
Dean
#!perl
$nmb = shift;
$file = shift;
open (FILE, "<$file") or die $!;
@file = <FILE>;
close FILE;
print "\n";
foreach (@file) {
if (abs($nmb - ++$i) <= 5) {
print $i, ":\t$_";
}
}
print "\n";