Grep/sed/awk solution to excludes lines between two search keywords

Question

I see there are ways to print lines between two search patterns, as explained here How to grep lines between start and end pattern?

sed -n '/aaa/,/cdn/p' file
awk '/test1/,/test2/'

I need negation of the above, and finding it hard to get the correct command/solution using the standard unix commands grep/sed/awk.

grep -v excludes the lines matching the words, but not all the line between two specific regexs.

Any hints?

Answer 1

Try

sed '/aaa/,/cdn/d' file

or

awk '/test1/,/test2/{next} {print}'

or (more compactly)

awk '/test1/,/test2/{next} 1'

which prints each record (line) by default, unless it matches /test1/,/test2/ in which case it skips to the next record.