Extract lines between 2 tokens in a text file using bash

Question

i have a text file which looks like this:

random useless text 
 
para1 
para2 
para3 
 
random us         


        

Answer 1

Maybe sed and awk have more elegant solutions, but I have a "poor man's" approach with grep, cut, head, and tail.

#!/bin/bash

dataFile="/path/to/some/data.txt"
startToken="token 1"
stopToken="token 2"

startTokenLine=$( grep -n "${startToken}" "${dataFile}" | cut -f 1 -d':' )
stopTokenLine=$( grep -n "${stopToken}" "${dataFile}" | cut -f 1 -d':' )

let stopTokenLine=stopTokenLine-1
let tailLines=stopTokenLine-startTokenLine

head -n ${stopTokenLine} ${dataFile} | tail -n ${tailLines}