How to copy a certain amout of lines to a new txt file in bash using awk

Question

I have a txt file which contains chapters, I want to copy each chapter to a new txt file using bash. for example:

"CHAPTER I. Down the Rabbit-Hole Alice was beginning to get very.......

CHAPTER II. The Pool of Tears

'Curiouser and curiouser,' cried Alice (she was so much surprised; that for the moment she quite forgot how to speak good English). ..... "

I want to create 2 files 1 for each chapter.

awk 'BEGIN{start="0"; end="0"; chapters="0"}
{if($1 -eq chapter){
    chapter++
    sed -n "$start,$end" Alice_book_aux > Alice_book_chapter_$chapter
    start = end
}
end++;}' Alice_book

This is what I thought I should do but is won't work:(

Answer 1

I'll make assumptions based on the given example.

1. AWK has an input parser that can process input through regexp filters
2. SED is an adequate tools to take excerpts from input, but AWK will suffice here.

Thus your revised code:

awk 'BEGIN {chapter=0;chapfile="";}
     /^"?CHAPTER / {
                       chapter++;
                       chapfile="Alice_book_chapter_"chapter;
                       printf "" > chapfile;
                   }
     { if (chapter -gt 0) {
        print >> chapfile;
       }
     }' Alice_book

As suggested by @karakfa, the awk script can be reduced to this:

awk '/^"?CHAPTER / {
                       chapter++;
                       chapfile="Alice_book_chapter_"chapter;
                   }
     chapter{
        print > chapfile;
     }
' Alice_book