in reply to Pattern Matching

This might DWIM:
#!/your/perl/here use strict; use warnings; my $last_line; while (<>) { if ( m/^Action:/ ) { print $last_line; } $last_line = $_; }
Assuming you put this in file find_devices, and your input file is called new_elements, you would run it like this:
perl find_devices new_elements
Please let us know if this works for you, or if it doesn't, why not.

Update:

For the rest of us, I've prefer this solution for newbies (having had a lot of interaction with some of them lately). There's no explicit open or close, there are only 2 variables mentioned (and only 1 needs to be declared), there's 1 while, 1 if, and 1 print. This could easily be a 1 liner:

perl -ne 'print $x if /^Action:/; $x=$_;' new_elements

-QM
--
Quantum Mechanics: The dreams stuff is made of