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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 XFREE86

unexpand

UNEXPAND(1)							   User Commands						       UNEXPAND(1)

NAME

       unexpand - convert spaces to tabs

SYNOPSIS

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

DESCRIPTION

       Convert blanks 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 blanks, instead of just initial blanks

       --first-only
	      convert only leading sequences of blanks (overrides -a)

       -t, --tabs=N
	      have tabs N characters apart instead of 8 (enables -a)

       -t, --tabs=LIST
	      use  comma  separated  list of tab positions The last specified position can be prefixed with '/' to specify a tab size to use after
	      the last explicitly specified tab stop.  Also a prefix of '+' can be used to align remaining tab stops relative to the  last  speci-
	      fied tab stop instead of the first column

       --help display this help and exit

       --version
	      output version information and exit

AUTHOR

       Written by David MacKenzie.

REPORTING BUGS

       GNU coreutils online help: <http://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/>
       Report unexpand translation bugs to <http://translationproject.org/team/>

COPYRIGHT

       Copyright (C) 2017 Free Software Foundation, Inc.  License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later <http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>.
       This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it.  There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.

SEE ALSO

       expand(1)

       Full documentation at: <http://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/unexpand>
       or available locally via: info '(coreutils) unexpand invocation'

GNU coreutils 8.28						   January 2018 						       UNEXPAND(1)
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