Delete blank line in regular file

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

Hi all,

I have file1 with line blank e.g.

$cat file1
aaa  111 222 333 444
bbb 555 666 777 888
ccc
ddd 1010 1010 1010 
eee

then i need delete the lines blank (3 and 5) so show

$cat file1
aaa  111 222 333 444
bbb 555 666 777 888
ddd 1010 1010 1010

Thanks you,

2

There are no blank lines in your file1 - I assume you mean you want to delete all rows which contain no columns except the first one?

What have you tried so far?

3

Yes sorry exactly delete all rows which contain blank

$cat file1 
aaa  111 222 333 444 
bbb  555 666 777 888 
ccc 
ddd  1010 1010 1010  
eee

to

$cat file1 
aaa  111 222 333 444 
bbb 555 666 777 888 
ddd 1010 1010 1010
4

your request is not clear

if you want to delete completely empty lines, try sed

sed '/^\s*$/d' file

your example will work with

awk 'NF!=1' file
1 Like
5

Hello aav1307,

Following may help you in same.(Not tested though)
Code 1: Following one will check if number of fields are one or line is empty it will not print those lines.

awk '{if(NF==1 || $0 ~ /^$/){next} else {print $0}}' Input_file

Code 2:Following one will look only for lines which have more than 1 field.

awk 'NF>1' Input_file

Code 3: If you want to simply remove empty lines in file.

grep -v '^$' Input_file

Thanks,
R. Singh

1 Like
6

Yes fine this work

awk 'NF!=1' file