Shell Programming and Scripting

Hello batchenr,

Could you please try following and let me know if this helps.

Code:

awk '!/^#/ && !/^devpts/ && !/^sysfs/ && !/^proc/ && !/^$/ && !/^\// && !/swap/{print $2}'   Input_file

Thanks,
R. Singh

Yes! thanks

OK, now, that we finally have established what exactly you want (a files content with all comments removed), try this, which i use to strip config files before reading:

Code:

sed 's/#.*$//;s/^[[:blank:]]*//;s/[[:blank:]]*$//;/^$/d' /input/file

The functionality is:

s/#.*$// remove comment signs and everything after
s/^[[:blank:]]*// remove leading whitespace
s/[[:blank:]]*$// remove trailing whitespace
/^$/d remove empty lines

Note that lines with comments are first made to empty lines by rule one (if the comment is not aligned with the beginning of line than rule 2 still reduces it to empty) and further removed by rule 4, so that they are effectively removed.

Note further, that comment signs will be removed regardless of them being in quotes, being escaped, etc., or not. If you need this functionality you cannot use regexps but have to use a parser.

You can extend this by further adding rules to filter out lines you are not interested in:

Code:

sed 's/#.*$//;s/^[[:blank:]]*//;s/[[:blank:]]*$//;/^$/d;/^devpts/d;/swap/d;/^sysfs/d;/^proc/d' /input/file

You should be able to extend this to fit your own needs.

I hope this helps.

bakunin