How about this:-

Code:

egrep -v "^#|^_|^$|^ *$" filename

To explain, this will get all lines that do not match any of the expression. The expression is explained as:-

You could then append either a redirect to create a new file (don't try to overwrite the source file) or perhaps a pipe to another process, e.g.

Code:

egrep -v "^#|^_|^$|^ *$" filename|while read line
do
   echo "I've got a line to do something whizzy with"
done

I hope that this helps, but please post back if I've missed the point.




Robin
Liverpool/Blackburn
UK