FWIW, an explanation of why what you tried didn't work.

/^interface/../shutdown/ will see a line starting with "interface", so the left side of .. will "activate" that instance of .. which will evaluate as "true" until the right side matches a line containing "shutdown". And because the action for the associated if statement is next, all the lines will just be ignored.

Also, note that the $_ =~ is redundant in this case. A match without a binding operator (=~ or !~) implicitly matches against $_

Which leads to: If you were intending to match against a specific variable, you would need to write:

$line =~ /^interface/ .. $line =~ /!/

otherwise, the left side would match against $line while the right side would match against $_

One way (not tested) you might still use the scalar range operator (also known as "flip-flop"):

my @block;
my $reject;
while (<>)
{
    if (/^interface/ .. /!/)
    {
        if (/shutdown/)
        {
            $reject = 1;
            @block = ();
        }
        if (not $reject)
        {
            unshift @block, $_;
        }
    }
    else
    {
        $reject = 0;
        if (@block > 0)
        {
            print @block;
            @block = ();
        }
    }
}

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In reply to Re: Parsing out mulitiple blocks of interesting data in files / ignoring other contents by RonW
in thread Parsing out mulitiple blocks of interesting data in files / ignoring other contents by GeorgMN

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