How to select lines between two marker patterns which may occur multiple times with awk/sed

Question

Using awk or sed how can I select lines which are occurring between two different marker patterns? There may be multiple sections marked with these

Answer 1

Don_crissti's answer from Show only text between 2 matching pattern?

firstmatch="abc"
secondmatch="cdf"
sed "/$firstmatch/,/$secondmatch/!d;//d" infile

which is much more efficient than AWK's application, see here.