Re: Delete only the nth block of text, multi-line

I made one minor change (added \n to the regular expression) to Davide's solution, to make the script get rid of an extra line that was showing up in the output. This assumes you are using GNU sed, other sed versions might not recognize \n in the regular expression.
 

 Daniel
 

 $ cat in
foo
[
  aaa 1
  bbb 1
  ccc 1
]
[
  ccc 2
  bbb 2
  aaa 2
]
[
  bbb 3
  ccc 3
  aaa 3
]
[
  bbb 4
  aaa 4
  ccc 4
]
bar
 

 $ cat sed.txt
:loop $!{ N; b loop } # accumulate
s/\[[^]]*\]\n//3 # delete
 

 $ sed -f sed.txt in
foo
[
  aaa 1
  bbb 1
  ccc 1
]
[
  ccc 2
  bbb 2
  aaa 2
]
[
  bbb 4
  aaa 4
  ccc 4
]
bar


 




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