How to delete the first few lines of data and a specific matching numeric number until the very end of data

Question

51 0 0 5  
0 0.0 0.0 0  
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8  
1, 2  
0.998 0.567  
3, 2 Rs12345  
0.7 0.2  
3, 2 Rs31256  
0.56 0.311  
3, 2 Rs25691  
0 0  
012.1313010310 0.1213212 0.2121331321
0.0121654564 0.254564564 0.25678646 
0.02154 0.2485674354 0.2434  

The resulting output should look like this

3, 2 Rs12345    
0.7 0.2  
3, 2 Rs31256  
0.56 0.311  
3, 2 Rs25691

I used the sed to achieve the desired result

sed -i -e '1,5d;/0 0/,$d' filename

This did not work. I am dealing with multiple files like this that have different lengths in the number of lines. Therefore, I will have to somehow get rid of the "0 0" and every line after that (very end of data)

Answer 1

You had it ALMOST right ...

sed -e '1,5d;/^0 0/,$d' genetics 
3, 2 Rs12345  
0.7 0.2  
3, 2 Rs31256  
0.56 0.311  
3, 2 Rs25691

Just add the -i back in if this is what you want

Answer 2

perl has a nice feature, called the range operator. It lets you do something like this:

#!/usr/bin/env perl

use strict;
use warnings;

while ( <DATA> ) { 
    print if 6 ... /0 0/;
}

__DATA__
51 0 0 5  
0 0.0 0.0 0  
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8  
1, 2  
0.998 0.567  
3, 2 Rs12345  
0.7 0.2  
3, 2 Rs31256  
0.56 0.311  
3, 2 Rs25691  
0 0  
012.1313010310 0.1213212 0.2121331321
0.0121654564 0.254564564 0.25678646 
0.02154 0.2485674354 0.2434  

You can test for being between two regular expressions, line numbers or a mix.

Although, looking at it, perhaps it's simpler to just:

while ( <DATA> ) { 
    next unless $. > 5; 
    last if /0 0/;
    print;
}

Handily - you can do this with the -p flag, to make it a one liner:

perl -pe 'next unless $. > 5; last if /0 0/' your_file

Because we're using last it aborts processing (and stops reading the file).

-p is a perl option that make it behave a bit like sed - it transforms a line, and prints the line afterwards.

Answer 3

sed -i -e '1,5d' -e '/0 0/,$d

if the line containing "0 0" is not at a fixed location.