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Top Forums UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers Remove blank lines using cat command Post 302906687 by bakunin on Monday 23rd of June 2014 03:28:00 AM
Old 06-23-2014
Quote:
Originally Posted by mushfiks1
how i remove empty or blank files using cat command.
hmm... How can i fly to the moon using an invalidated credit card and a screwdriver?

The short answer is: you can't because the tool you want to use (in this case "cat") isn't designed to do what you want. (Actually "cat" is for conCATenating files.)

The long answer is: you might want to rephrase/rethink your question and get a better answer. But it won't even stop at that. Rethinking your question will put you into a state of mind where the solution will come more easily to you, not only because you will get better answers but because you may find it out yourself. Defining correctly (rigidly and meticulously) the goal is - more often than not - already three quarters of the solution.

There are several tools doing perfectly what you want, Unix is rich in all sorts of text filters: sed, awk, sort, and even the native shell can do what you want. You already got a solution in awk, so here is one in sed:

Code:
sed '/^$/d' /path/to/input > /path/to/output

I hope this helps.

bakunin
 

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IGAWK(1)							 Utility Commands							  IGAWK(1)

NAME
igawk - gawk with include files SYNOPSIS
igawk [ all gawk options ] -f program-file [ -- ] file ... igawk [ all gawk options ] [ -- ] program-text file ... DESCRIPTION
Igawk is a simple shell script that adds the ability to have ``include files'' to gawk(1). AWK programs for igawk are the same as for gawk, except that, in addition, you may have lines like @include getopt.awk in your program to include the file getopt.awk from either the current directory or one of the other directories in the search path. OPTIONS
See gawk(1) for a full description of the AWK language and the options that gawk supports. EXAMPLES
cat << EOF > test.awk @include getopt.awk BEGIN { while (getopt(ARGC, ARGV, "am:q") != -1) ... } EOF igawk -f test.awk SEE ALSO
gawk(1) Effective AWK Programming, Edition 1.0, published by the Free Software Foundation, 1995. AUTHOR
Arnold Robbins (arnold@skeeve.com). Free Software Foundation Nov 3 1999 IGAWK(1)
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