Strip one line from 2 blank lines in a file

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

Hi
Is there any command to scan thru a file looking for 2 consecutive blank lines and if any remove one of them. Please let me know.

Regards,
Tipsy

2

I think the website below has what you are looking for

http://www.student.northpark.edu/pemente/sed/sed1line.txt

3

"sedscpt" file contains
/^$/{
:nxt
n
/^$/!{x;p;x;}
$ {/^$/p;}
/^$/b nxt
}

sed -n -f sedscpt -e "$ {/^$/p;}" file

hope this may help you.

4

awk ' {
if( $0 == "" )
prev_blnk = 1;
else
{
if ( prev_blnk == 1) { print "\n" $0 }
else { print $0; }
prev_blnk = 0;
}
}' file

5

Perfect. Thanks anbu23.

Regards,
-T

6

# cat -r filename
the -r will only display one blank line for every consecutive blank lines it finds...

7

you can also try this

cat -r file1 >file2