Deleting all lines after first occurrence of a string in a line

Question

I have a large file test.txt like this example:

foo
before ...
before some line 
foo something interesting bar
after some lines
after ...
bar

How do I create a new file with just the lines before the first occurrence of the string "something interesting" with basic bash commands like sed or grep (not awk, I need this on an embedded device without awk)?

Solution

sed '/something interesting/,$d' < file > newfile

Which can be optimized to:

sed -n '/something interesting/q;p' < file > newfile

for sed to quit as soon as it finds the pattern.

Which with the GNU implementation of sed, as noted by @RakeshSharma, can be simplified to

sed '/something interesting/Q' < file > newfile

To truncate the file in-place, with ksh93 instead of bash, you could do:

printf '' <>; file >#'*something interesting*'

• <>; is like the standard <> redirection operator (open in read+write) except that the file is truncated at the end if the command is successful.
• <#pattern seeks to the start of the next line matching the pattern.

(note that it seems to work (with ksh93u+ at least) with printf '' on stdout but not with some other builtin commands like true, : or eval. Looks like a bug. Also it can't be the last command of a script (another bug)).

Comments

[Admin]

A slight nitpick (and clarification). sed and grep are not bash commands; they are separate commands, which can be invoked from any shell you happen to be using.

[Admin]

Show all the file up to the match

[Stéphane Chazelas]

@RakeshSharma, good point. I've added it

[pa4080]

The first suggestion works perfectly, thanks. I spent some time to realize how to use it wit shell variable expansion: sed "/${VAR}/,$ d" - note the white space between $ and d.

[Sadi]

And the GNU sed command to edit in place would simply be sed -i '/something interesting/Q' 'file'