[Plug] grep, awk, sed ?

[root <bdugan@netaxs.com>]

I enjoyed the recent flurry of response to someone's question about 'rm *'-- it
seemed to point out that there are lots of smart and experienced Unix people on
this list.  I read the responses and learned some useful things that I might
have known had I ever actually been taught about Unix!

I seem to be constantly trying new organizers, calendars, and ways of keeping
notes on my projects, but I generally wind up back at the point of keeping a
day by day text diary of my work.  ASCII files seem so quick, simple, and
universal compared to GUI based approaches.

The thing is, I'd like to mark entries that I put in my text based diary, so I
can scan for them by subject later, when I've forgotten when I worked on things.

If my text file is:

---------
6/9/99
 called Roy
 [spectrophotometer..
 added timebased acquisition code to Mac program
 replaced HiliteControl approach with gMode approach
 ]
 went for a jog
 blah blah blah

-------

The Question is:
How can I print the lines between the [] brackets, using the subject
('spectrophotometer') to search?

The grep is not so good, since the command
  grep "spectrophotometer.." diary.txt -10

prints 20 lines with the file name at the beginning of each line and, anyway,
it would be much better if it would stop when it to the ']'.

Is there some slick way to do this with awk or sed or some other utility? I'd
generally just like to see the text blocks in a text terminal window, but I
suppose I could pipe them into a project file, too, which would probably be
handy.

Thanks in advance!

Ben


--
Benjamin Ward Dugan
President
Current Designs, Inc.
3527 Hamilton Street
Philadelphia, PA 19104-2420
ph: 215-387-5456
fx: 215-386-4857

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