Shell Programming and Scripting

Indeed, with hand-edited files in particular there are often empty lines that are not entirely empty and that contains some form of spacing. Also, lines with only comment can be indented for clarity and therefore do not always start at the first position on the line. So in general I would tend to use:

Code:

awk '$1~/^[^#]/' file

To exclude empty lines and lines with only comment that may contain leading spacing and

Code:

awk '$1!~/^#/' file

To only exclude lines with only comment and that may contain leading spacing and

Code:

awk NF

to only exclude empty lines that that may contain tabs or spaces.

Also hanson44 & Scrutinizer, thanks ..,

Scrutinizer,
Thanks much , this worked... to remove empty lines, and comments( starting with # ) and seems to be fixed earlier issues, It worked even the file has a space and then it has the comment starting with #.

Code:

awk '$1~/^[^#]/' file

Thanks.