Some configuration and output text formats contain sections like the following:

foo:
   value1
   value2
bar:
   value 3

In this article, two scripts are presented that print all consecutive indented lines that follow a non-indented line that matches a search pattern given by a regular expression.

This means, given the single argument foo and the standard input above, the scripts should

• determine the line that matches foo and
• print the following two lines, but no other lines.

Also, the indentation of the printed lines should be removed.

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The stat command from GNU core utilities features not only a --format FORMAT option but also a --printf FORMAT one, the difference being that the latter allows for backslash escapes such as \n.

This allows for custom per-file report formats containing newlines, for example:

stat --printf 'Name: %n\nSize: %s Bytes\n' /etc/passwd

If the format string becomes more complex, the command line soon becomes unwieldy, such as:

stat --printf 'Name: %n\nOwner ID: %u\nSize: %s Bytes\nLast accessed: %x\n' /etc/passwd

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Given a file containing bytes of text with lines separated by the newline character (\n), one of these lines can be said to be “the last line of the file”; it is a sequence of bytes occurring in the file, for which holds:

• The sequence contains no newline character, and
• the sequence is followed by at most one newline character and no other bytes.

The task at hand is, using shell utilities, to write a procedure that makes sure that a given file contains a last line that contains a desired sequence of text characters.

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