#get line number of occurrence in text file and then print out x lines from that point #get the line number of the first occurrence of our search text linenumber=`grep -n "someuniqueitem" inventory.txt|head -n1|cut -d ":" -f 1` #linestop represents how many lines after the occurring line we want to print out in this case "20" linestop=$((linenumber+20)) # sed prints out the line range we want f........