Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi Guru's , I have a whole bunch of files in /var/tmp that i need to strip any blank lines from, so ive written the following script to identify the lines (which works perfectly).. but i wanted to know, how can I actually strip the identified lines from the actual source files ??

Code:

	my @all = qx{ls /var/tmp}; # perform an ls on the folder
	
	foreach (@all) {
				
		open(IN, "/var/tmp/$_");
			chomp(my $file = $_);
			my $counter = "0";
			while  (<IN>) {
				$counter++;
				if ($_ =~ /^$/) {
				  print "blank line found in $file at line number $counter\n";
                                  #something here to go and fix it in the actual file ?
				}
			}
		close(IN);
	}

Any help or advice on this would be greatly appreciated

Code:

sed -i '/^$/d' /tmp/*

Careful, this will change any file in /tmp

thanks Scrutinizer for your response ... im ideally looking for a way in perl to do this

thank you anyway

I think Scrutinizer's method is a very simple and elegant way of doing what you want to do.
I fail to understand why you would want to open each file and read it line by line just to remove blank lines.
You have a loaded Uzi and you want to club someone to death with it ?

tyler_durden

There is no quick one or two liners native to perl to do this. If you want to use the perl program you have already written I would insert the sed statement Scrutinizer posted after the close file line in your foreach structure followed by a copy statement using the system function.

Code:

system("sed -i '/^$/d' $_ > ${_}.noblanks")
system("cp ${_}.noblanks ${_}")

Hi Tyler, the files in the /var/tmp folder are generated from another process which has been known (annoyingly) to produce output files with blank lines ..the reason i have to go through each file line by line is because i need to identify exactly which line number in which file is returning blank and send it to a log file. you are right, there is no need for me to actually fix these issues within this actual script but i thought it make sense to do so if possible

I read on another site that I can set my file location within my script to say $file and then run this

Code:

my $file = "/var/tmp/0629AN1208.net";
$file =~ s/^\n//g;

but that doesnt seem to work, whereas if i run the equivalent one liner from the command line (see below) it works perfectly .

Code:

perl -pi -e "s/^\n//" /var/tmp/0629AN1208.net

is there a way to convert that one liner into something I can run within a perl script ?

Look at my above post. It does just that.