Shell Programming and Scripting

Running into a little problem with blank lines.

My file is of this format:
To number each line of the file i would use:

Code:

 
n=1
echo "$FILE" |
while read line
do
echo "$n) $line"
n=`expr $n + 1`

But really, i dont want to number the blank lines.
What i've tried is to use sed commands to the FILE before i pipe its contents into the while, but sed just bunchs the contents together and my code reads it at one line..

The sed command sed 'nd' reads every other line right? Unfortuantely for me that doesnt work either..

For simplicity you might want to try the cat command.

Code:

cat -b filename

or if you want to stick with your code just add the command before the while command.

Code:

grep -v '^$' filename

to delete all blank lines.

or

Code:

grep -v '^$' filename |cat -b

it may however depends of how large your file is. Hope this helps.

Try this awk solution:

Code:

awk 'NF{$0=++c FS $0}1'  file

cat file.txt | sed '/^$/d' | cat -n

Code:

sed '/./!d' file | sed =

Can i store the contents of the file into a varaible and still be able to delete blank lines? Thats what i've been trying

Well, what im after is to use awk or sed ( awk might be easiest ) to print each line of the file sepearately.

awk $NF1 ( for line 1 )
awk $NF2 ( for line 2 )

i dont know the syntax for it..

The plain text that i posted above is similar to the contents of the file that im working with. Is there an awk command to do the following:

awk ( echo something ) $myvar print the line 1 of the contents of the varaible..

Im sorry, im so bad with unix.