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Full Discussion: Why cant i delete blank lines?
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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LEARN ABOUT REDHAT

unexpand

UNEXPAND(1)								FSF							       UNEXPAND(1)

NAME

       unexpand - convert spaces to tabs

SYNOPSIS

       unexpand [OPTION]... [FILE]...

DESCRIPTION

       Convert spaces in each FILE to tabs, writing to standard output.  With no FILE, or when FILE is -, read standard input.

       Mandatory arguments to long options are mandatory for short options too.

       -a, --all
	      convert all whitespace, instead of initial whitespace

       -t, --tabs=NUMBER
	      have tabs NUMBER characters apart instead of 8

       -t, --tabs=LIST
	      use comma separated list of explicit tab positions

       --help display this help and exit

       --version
	      output version information and exit

AUTHOR

       Written by David MacKenzie.

REPORTING BUGS

       Report bugs to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org>.

COPYRIGHT

       Copyright (C) 2002 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
       This is free software; see the source for copying conditions.  There is NO warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICU-
       LAR PURPOSE.

SEE ALSO

       The full documentation for unexpand is maintained as a Texinfo manual.  If the info and unexpand programs are properly  installed  at  your
       site, the command

	      info unexpand

       should give you access to the complete manual.

unexpand (coreutils) 4.5.3					   February 2003						       UNEXPAND(1)
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