Grep for contents between two markers with newlines

Question

Just curious if there's a way I can show the output between two markers?

I was trying grep -r "<cron_expr>.*</run>" * but it doesn't seem to be returning as expected. Which is to say its not showing newline breaks?

So I guess the the real question is how can i find out what between two markers regardless of newline BS. I can't install on this system so no pcregrep =(

Maybe AWK?

(P.s. someone should make an AWK tag)

<crontab>
    <jobs>
        <enterprise_reward_balance_warning_notification>
            <schedule><cron_expr>1 * * * *</cron_expr></schedule>
            <run><model>enterprise_reward/observer::scheduledBalanceExpireNotification</model></run>
        </enterprise_reward_balance_warning_notification>
        <enterprise_reward_expire_points>
            <schedule><cron_expr>1 * * * *</cron_expr></schedule>
            <run><model>enterprise_reward/observer::scheduledPointsExpiration</model></run>
        </enterprise_reward_expire_points>
    </jobs>
</crontab>

I just want to show whats on the <schedule> and <run> line(s if more than one, like above) anytime I see and what file they're in.

Answer 1

AWK script

AWK is probably the answer using the /start/,/stop/ pattern like this:

/<schedule>/,/<\/schedule>/ {
    print;
}
/<run>/,/<\/run>/ {
    print;
}

This will print everything in the schedule and run tags (including the tags) and will preserve new lines. Adapt it to print what you need. To run it:

cat myfile.txt | awk -f script.awk

XSLT style sheet

Here's an XSLT version that should do something very similar. Run it using xsltproc, which should be installed by default.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">

<xsl:template match="schedule">
    <xsl:value-of select="." />
</xsl:template>

<xsl:template match="run">
    <xsl:value-of select="." />
</xsl:template>

</xsl:stylesheet>

Answer 2

There are lots of ways to do what I think you want too do.

you could use sed

say I wanted to get the numbers in between lspci -nn

it spits out numbers like this

[1234:4321]

I would do this

lspci -nn| sed 's/.*\[\(.*\)\].*/\1/'

This is my first post here so I hope the escape character's are correct. But I am not sure what you are trying to do.