Sed Expression – Extract Group of First Match with Sed

sed -e 's/string>!\[TEST\[\(.*\)]>\/string>/\1/' file

or

sed -e 's|string>!\[TEST\[\(.*\)]>/string>|\1|' file

Output:

Extract this string

This feels a bit silly, but:

$ tac file.txt |sed -e '/^virt-top/q' |tac
virt-top time  11:25:17 Host foo.example.com x86_64 32/32CPU 1200MHz 65501MB
   ID S RDRQ WRRQ RXBY TXBY %CPU %MEM   TIME    NAME
    1 R    0    0    0    0  0.6 12.0  96:02:53 instance-0000036f
    2 R    0    0    0    0  0.2 12.0  95:44:08 instance-00000372

GNU tac reverses the file (many non-GNU systems have tail -r instead), the sed picks lines until the first that starts with virt-top. You can add sed 1,2d or tail -n +3 to remove the headers.

Or in awk:

$ awk '/^virt-top/ { a = "" } { a = a $0 ORS } END {printf "%s", a}' file.txt 
virt-top time  11:25:17 Host foo.example.com x86_64 32/32CPU 1200MHz 65501MB
   ID S RDRQ WRRQ RXBY TXBY %CPU %MEM   TIME    NAME
    1 R    0    0    0    0  0.6 12.0  96:02:53 instance-0000036f
    2 R    0    0    0    0  0.2 12.0  95:44:08 instance-00000372

It just collects all the lines to a variable, and clears that variable on a line starting with virt-top.

If the file is very large, the tac+sed solution is bound to be faster since it only needs to read the tail end of the file while the awk solution reads the full file from the top.