How can I match text at the beginning of a line and print the X previous lines along with the matched one?

Question

I found a similar question here, but it is not exactly what I want.

Let's suppose I have a text file like this:

[...]

age: 10
country: United States
city: New York
name: John

age: 27
country: Canada
city: Toronto
name: Robert

age: 32
country: Mexico
city: Guadalajara
name: Pedro

[...]

I want to match the line starting with "name: Robert" and print the 3 previous lines along with the matched result, getting only these lines:

age: 27
country: Canada
city: Toronto
name: Robert

How can I do this in the terminal?

Answer 1

Using grep

$ grep -B3 '^name: Robert$' input_file
age: 27
country: Canada
city: Toronto
name: Robert

Answer 2

You already have the best way, just use grep -B, but you could also use perl in "paragraph mode". This mode is enabled by the -00 switch and means that a "line" is now defined by two consecutive newline characters, basically a paragraph. This lets you do things like:

$ perl -00 -ne 'print if /name: Robert\b/' file
age: 27
country: Canada
city: Toronto
name: Robert

$

You could also do the same thing in awk by setting the record separator (RS) to empty (''):

$ awk -v RS='' '/name: Robert$/' file
age: 27
country: Canada
city: Toronto
name: Robert
$

The awk one also has the advantage of not printing an extra newline which the perl does.

Answer 3

The format of your data is the same as the "recfile format" used by GNU recutils. This means we may query your file like so:

$ recsel -e 'name = "Pedro"' file
age: 32
country: Mexico
city: Guadalajara
name: Pedro

To get the names of everyone aged 20 or more:

$ recsel -e 'age >= 20' -P name file
Robert

Pedro

Etc.

See info recutils or the GNU recutils website for further information.

Answer 4

Using the line editor ed we do it by first selecting the target lines(g//), then create a range around it(-3,.), and run a command on that range(p)

ed -s inp <<\eof
g/^name: Robert$/-3,.p
eof

## Gnu sed in extended regex mode
## collect 4 lines in pattern space then print the whole pattern space on match else clip first line and append the next

sed -E ':1;$!{N;/(.*\n){3}/!b1;/\nname: Robert$/b};D' file

# using the -p option to autoprint current record 

perl -00 -pe '($_)=/((?:.*\n){3}name: Robert\n)/' file

Output:

age: 27
country: Canada
city: Toronto
name: Robert