Delete blank lines from a file

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

Hi,
I want to use diff to compare two files in a Perl file. But one of the files has some blank lines at the end. So I want to delete the blank lines from the file firstly and then use diff to compare them. But I dont know how to delete the blank lines from the files. Meanwhile, the system is solaris 10.
Is there a Perl Module that can compare the files?
So far as I known, the File::Compare can compare the files, but it can not ignor the blank lines, space, tab, etc.
can you help me out of this?

Thanks and Best Regards
Damon

2

You can use sed for that.

sed '/^$/d' your_file > new_file
mv new_file your_file

tyler_durden

3

thanks anyway
is there any other good ideas? I dont want to solve the problem like this.

4

Ok, would you like to perform inline editing ?
You can use the "perl pie" technique for that -

$
$
$ cat -n f0
     1  line no. 1
     2  line no. 2
     3  line no. 3
     4
     5
     6
$
$
$ perl -pi.bak -e 's/^\s*$//' f0
$
$ cat -n f0
     1  line no. 1
     2  line no. 2
     3  line no. 3
$
$
$

tyler_durden

5

clean empty line directly from the input file

vi -c "g/^$/d" -c "wq"  urfile
6

If you have a diff that supports -B, then you can use that:

From the diff man page: