Multi-line regular expression matching

[Joel Hammer]

For multiline edititing in sed, read about N and read about the hold space,
too.
Joel

On Mon, Jun 02, 2003 at 09:24:24AM -0700, listmail at rotundus.com wrote:
> I'm attempting to write a script that will delete a certain portion of a
> data file.  What I want to do is delete everything between (and including)
> two lines, line A and line B
> 
> The "file":
> ...
> #lineA
> ...
> #lineB
> ...
> 
> To an extent I don't really care what tool is used, but I've been unable
> to  accomplish the task with either Perl or SED so I'm wondering if there
> might be something wrong with the regular expressions that I've tried.
> 
> A couple of the reg-exp's that I've tried:
> 's/#lineA.*#lineB//gs'
> 's/#lineA(.|\n)*#lineB//gs'
> 
> Both of the above seem to work fine if #lineA and #lineB are on the same
> line in the file (I've yet to add in anything to check if #lineA and
> #lineB occur at the start of the line, but that'll be added in later). 
> Shouldn't the /s modifier allow multi-line matching to take place?
> 
> David Aikema
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