bash grep newline

Question

[Editorial insertion: Possible duplicate of the same poster\'s earlier question?]

Hi, I need to extract from the file:

first
second
         


        

Answer 1

I like notnoop's answer, but building on AndrewY's answer (which is better for those without pcregrep, but way too complicated), you can just do:

RESULT=`grep -A1 -s -m1 '^\s*second\s*$' file | grep -s -B1 -m1 '^\s*third\s*$'`