How can I make 'grep' show a single line five lines above the grepped line?

Question

I\'ve seen some examples of grepping lines before and after, but I\'d like to ignore the middle lines. So, I\'d like the line five lines before, but nothing else. Can this b

Answer 1

If you only want to have the 5th line before the match you can do this:

grep -B 5 pattern file | head -1

Edit:
If you can have more than one match, you could try this (exchange pattern with your actual pattern):

sed -n '/pattern/!{H;x;s/^.*\n\(.*\n.*\n.*\n.*\n.*\)$/\1/;x};/pattern/{x;s/^\([^\n]*\).*$/\1/;p}' file

I took this from a Sed tutorial, section: Keeping more than one line in the hold buffer, example 2 and adapted it a bit.