sed and blank lines

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

hello,

i have tried to remove blank lines from a file using korn shell script file.. it doesn't seem to work!

i tried sed '/^\s*$/d' infile > outfile but that didn't work
i tried sed 's/ *$//;/^$/d' infile > outfile and that didn't work
i tried sed '/^s./d' infile > outfile and that didn't work

what can i do? this is a huge file and some blank lines might be spaces? or tabs? how can i know?

thank you

2

Does it have to be sed?

grep -v '^[[:space:]]*$' infile > outfile

You could use a similar regexp in sed of course if you wished...

3

thank you Annihilannic, that worked beautifully on the command line. Use the same thing inside of a script file?

thank you

4

Yes. Virtually anything you can do on a command-line will be fine in a script. Just keep in mind that the script may not necessarily be running from the same directory.

5 
sed -e '/^[[:space:]]*$/d' file
6 
awk '!/^$/' file
7

Thanks to everyone who helped! much appreciated..