Taking the essence.
Have you ever found yourself browsing through individual sequence records of the NCBI GenBank database and wishing that you could extract only the metadata information of a record (e.g., authors, publication status, taxonomy), but not the feature table of a record or the sequence itself? With the help of Entrez Direct and awk this is easy.
Take, for example, two complete plastid genomes of Cabomba, which are saved as GenBank accessions MG720558 and MG720559. You can easily extract the metadata in Bash via the following command:
efetch -db nucleotide -format gb -id MG720558,MG720559 |
awk '/FEATURES/{flag=1} /LOCUS/{flag=0} !flag'
Die