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Full Discussion: How to remove blank lines
Top Forums Shell Programming and Scripting How to remove blank lines Post 302524982 by bakunin on Wednesday 25th of May 2011 08:59:44 AM
Old 05-25-2011
Quote:
Originally Posted by mayursingru
I tried using
Code:
 sed '/^$/d' filename

but to no avail.

Regards,
Mayur
It might be that "empty" lines are not completely empty but filled with spaces (or other non-printable characters). Try the following:

Code:
sed '/^[<blank><tab>]*$/d' /path/to/input > /path/to/output

Replace "<blank>" and "<tab>" with literal blank/tabulator characters.

Still, the way you presented your expected output was a bit different: you wanted to retain a blank line before every paragraph starting with "Error". To accomplish this try:

Code:
sed '/^[<blank><tab>]*$/d
     /^Error.*$/ s/^/^M/' /path/to/input > /path/to/output

The "^M" is a literal newline. You get it (in vi) by switching to insert-mode, pressing CRTL-V and then ENTER.

I hope this helps.

bakunin
 

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TR(1)							      General Commands Manual							     TR(1)

NAME
tr - translate characters SYNOPSIS
tr [ -cds ] [ string1 [ string2 ] ] DESCRIPTION
Tr copies the standard input to the standard output with substitution or deletion of selected characters (runes). Input characters found in string1 are mapped into the corresponding characters of string2. When string2 is short it is padded to the length of string1 by dupli- cating its last character. Any combination of the options -cds may be used: -c Complement string1: replace it with a lexicographically ordered list of all other characters. -d Delete from input all characters in string1. -s Squeeze repeated output characters that occur in string2 to single characters. In either string a noninitial sequence -x, where x is any character (possibly quoted), stands for a range of characters: a possibly empty sequence of codes running from the successor of the previous code up through the code for x. The character followed by 1, 2 or 3 octal digits stands for the character whose 16-bit value is given by those digits. The character sequence followed by 1, 2, 3, or 4 hexadecimal digits stands for the character whose 16-bit value is given by those digits. A followed by any other character stands for that character. EXAMPLES
Replace all upper-case ASCII letters by lower-case. tr A-Z a-z <mixed >lower Create a list of all the words in one per line in where a word is taken to be a maximal string of alphabetics. String2 is given as a quoted newline. tr -cs A-Za-z ' ' <file1 >file2 SOURCE
/src/cmd/tr.c SEE ALSO
sed(1) TR(1)
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