"...does this make sense?"

Better, but without more sample data (including examples of non-desired matches) requested above, not enough.

Kennethk, there's no output after running your code

Now let me clarify myself; I have a file with tons of lines, but there're many lines that I want to join in one and I found that I can match the start with "remotely" and the end with "p_agrs", so the lines that are in the middle would be in the one which contains "remotely", later I'll drop the rest of them using a grep remotely data01 > data02

I am confused. If I copy the posted file:

EV = 0x10eb250 (class,   event_handle: 3503519, mc_ueid: 1278629168)
20100708 224608.259843 RULES: IMC110203I: #3503519: $EV.m
c_host
20100708 224608.260757 RULES: IMC110801I: #3503519: Rule e
execution starting with
.
.
.
msg='script to be execute remotely:
 exists("TRUSTEDALARM");
Local Id: Rem_010965WAP_18504';
.
.
.
p_agrs
[download]

into the file 'input.txt' and then execute the command

perl -e 'while(<>){chomp; last if /p_agrs/;print if /remotely/}' < input.txt

I get the output

msg='script to be execute remotely:

Is this not consistent with what you observe?

From the discussion I see that I misunderstood your initial posting. But I am as confused as kennethk is.

What I think so far:

• you have a file with a lot of lines
• you want to match several lines and join them into one
• the lines you want to match build a consecutive range (e.g. lines 5-11)
• the range of lines you want to match starts with a line containing the string "remotely"
• the range of lines you want match ends with a line containing the string "p_agrs"

Based upon that, I guessed this code:

#! /usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;


# open file and read from that handle...
while ( <DATA> ) {
    chomp;
    print if m/remotely/ ... m/p_agrs/;
    print $/ if m/p_agrs/;
}

__DATA__
not me
foo remotely
bar01
bar02
bar03
p_agrs
i am not here
foo2 remotely
barbar01
p_agrs
i am out...
[download]

result:

foo remotelybar01bar02bar03p_agrs
foo2 remotelybarbar01p_agrs
[download]