Delete range of lines above pattern with sed (or awk)

Question

I have the following code that will remove lines with the pattern banana and 2 lines after it:

sed '/banana/I,+2 d' file

So far, so good! But I need it to remove 2 lines before banana, but I can't get it with a minus sign or whatever (similar to what grep -v -B2 banana file should do but doesn't):

teresaejunior@localhost ~ > LC_ALL=C sed '-2,/banana/I d' file
sed: invalid option -- '2'
teresaejunior@localhost ~ > LC_ALL=C sed '/banana/I,-2 d' file
sed: -e expression #1, char 16: unexpected `,'
teresaejunior@localhost ~ > LC_ALL=C sed '/banana/I,2- d' file
sed: -e expression #1, char 17: unknown command: `-'

Answer 1

Sed doesn't backtrack: once it's processed a line, it's done. So “find a line and print the previous N lines” isn't going to work as is, unlike “find a line and print the next N lines” which is easy to graft on.

If the file isn't too long, since you seem to be ok with GNU extensions, you can use tac to reverse the lines of the file.

tac | sed '/banana/I,+2 d' | tac

Another angle of attack is to maintain a sliding window in a tool like awk. Adapting from Is there any alternative to grep's -A -B -C switches (to print few lines before and after )? (warning: untested):

#!/bin/sh
{ "exec" "awk" "-f" "$0" "$@"; }
# The array h contains the history of lines that are eligible for being "before" lines.
# The variable until contains the number of the last "after" line to omit.
match($0, pattern) {   # the current line matches
    for (i in h) {
        delete h[i];   # delete before and after lines
    }
    until=NR+after;    # record the last after line to print
}
{
    if (NR<=until) print $0;    # from a match to its last after line: print
    else h[NR]=$0;              # after that: save in history
    print h[NR-before];         # print line too old to be a before line
    delete h[NR-before];        # remove line too old to be a before line
}
END {exit !until}               # exit status: 0 if there was a match, else 1

Answer 2

Using the "sliding window" in perl:

perl -ne 'push @lines, $_;
          splice @lines, 0, 3 if /banana/;
          print shift @lines if @lines > 2
          }{ print @lines;'

Answer 3

Using man 1 ed:

str='
1
2
3
banana
4
5
6
banana
8
9
10
'

# using Bash
cat <<-'EOF' | ed -s <(echo "$str")  | sed -e '1{/^$/d;}' -e '2{/^$/d;}'
H
0i


.
,g/banana/km\
'm-2,'md
,p
q
EOF