UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Pls post a hexdump/octal dump of your input file so the guessing can be replaced by analysing.

OK. If you really want to get rid of blank lines (lines containing zero or more space and/or tab characters terminated by a newline character) rather than empty lines (lines that only contain the terminating newline character), there are still LOTS of ways to do it. Two are:

Code:

grep '[^        ]' text

where the characters between the square brackets are <circumflex>, <space>, and <tab>. or with sed instead of grep:

Code:

sed '/^[        ]*$/d' text

where the characters between the square brackets are just <space>, and <tab>.

For all we know, there could be control characters in the data, in which case none of the solutions provided will work.

RudiC has given the best advice yet.

Regards,
Alister

More than likely because what the code does is if there is no fields it is skipped.

@MaintdotC
Yet again, please post what Operating System and version you are running. This really matters - expecially if it happens to be MACOS or Cygwin.

Please post sample input data using this sed command which is designed to make control codes visible and make white space visible. In your case, the line terminators could be important.

Code:

sed -n l filename

Please then post sample expected output data to match you sample input data, with an expanation of the process if it is not obvious.


Footnote: Please explain what you think your sed command does? Where did you find pipe characters in unix group file? What is SEARCHSTRING for? Why "\r\n" (looks like trying to convert to MSDOS format to me)?
Others have posted valid commands to remove white space.

The script posted contains fundamental design issues which we can address once we see the sample data.

The sed command you listed does produce some slashes between the text of the input used for my script but for some reason I am now receiving the desired output. I didn't make a backup of my script and accidentally removed it, so when I wrote it again this morning I didn't even put in a sed expression to remove whitespaces and it works for some reason. Not sure what happened between last night and today but I'm good now - thanks all for your support.