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Top Forums Shell Programming and Scripting Why cant i delete blank lines? Post 302266032 by bakunin on Tuesday 9th of December 2008 07:34:05 AM
Old 12-09-2008
You should not pipe one sed into the next. Put all your sed statements together into one script.

Your blank lines might consist of non-printing characters, maybe spaces and/or tabs.

To find out you could display the file using "od -ax" and have a look at the hex codes of your characters.

If it is only tabs and blanks (aka "whitespace") then use the following expression (replace "<b>" with a blank and "<tab>" with a literal tab char):

Code:
sed '/^[<b><tab>]*$/d'

I hope this helps.

bakunin
 

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RE_COMP(3)						     Linux Programmer's Manual							RE_COMP(3)

NAME
re_comp, re_exec - BSD regex functions SYNOPSIS
#define _REGEX_RE_COMP #include <sys/types.h> #include <regex.h> char *re_comp(char *regex); int re_exec(char *string); DESCRIPTION
re_comp() is used to compile the null-terminated regular expression pointed to by regex. The compiled pattern occupies a static area, the pattern buffer, which is overwritten by subsequent use of re_comp(). If regex is NULL, no operation is performed and the pattern buffer's contents are not altered. re_exec() is used to assess whether the null-terminated string pointed to by string matches the previously compiled regex. RETURN VALUE
re_comp() returns NULL on successful compilation of regex otherwise it returns a pointer to an appropriate error message. re_exec() returns 1 for a successful match, zero for failure. CONFORMING TO
4.3BSD. NOTES
These functions are obsolete; the functions documented in regcomp(3) should be used instead. SEE ALSO
regcomp(3), regex(7), GNU regex manual COLOPHON
This page is part of release 3.27 of the Linux man-pages project. A description of the project, and information about reporting bugs, can be found at http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/. GNU
1995-07-14 RE_COMP(3)
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