Extract lines between 2 tokens in a text file using bash

Question

i have a text file which looks like this:

random useless text 
 
para1 
para2 
para3 
 
random us         


        

Answer 1

For anything like this, I'd reach for Perl, with its combination of (amongst others) sed and awk capabilities. Something like (beware - untested):

my $recording = 0;
my @results = ();
while (<STDIN>) {
   chomp;
   if (/token 1/) {
      $recording = 1;
   }
   else if (/token 2/) {
      $recording = 0;
   }
   else if ($recording) {
      push @results, $_;
   }
}