Perl Script: Search for string from a folder with multiple files

Question

I have a Folder with multiple .txt files in it. I want to check few strings in those text files and give output as a out.txt with 5 lines above and 5 lines below of the located string.

Answer 1

It is easier to do with grep:

grep -A 5 -B 5 'searchstring' *.txt > a.out

With Perl :-)

use strict;use warnings;
`grep -A 5 -B 5 'searchstring' *.txt > a.out`;
die "Something went wrong: $!" if $?;

Answer 2

if you insist on a perl oneliner;

perl -n -e 'if (/searchStringHere/) {print "\n\n\n\n\n$_\n\n\n\n\n"}' *.txt

If the grep solution works for you, i consider it to be more elegant...

update

it just struck me that you might be a windows user, so you don't have grep...

this code was not tested, as i don't have perl installed on this machine, but it should work: !#yourperl/perl

$flag, $l1, $l2, $l3, $l4, $l5, $l6;
$cnt = 5;
$file = shift;
open("$file") || die "can't open $file\n";
while (<>) {
 $l1 = $l2; # starting with reserving the lines for back print
 $l2 = $l3;
 $l4 = $l5;
 $l5 = $l6;
 $l6 = $_;
 if (/your string here/) {
   $cnt = 5;
   print ($l1$l2$l3$l4$l5$l6);# print line + 5 prev lines
   next
 }
 if ($cnt >0) { # print the next 5 lines
    print $l6;
    $cnt--;
 } 
}