Using sed to remove lines where field is empty

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

I was just looking at this post: delete multiple empty lines.
and I am looking to achieve the same with sed. So the idea is to delete lines from a file where a certain field has no value.

Inputfile:

EMID MMDDYY HOURS JOB EMNAME
0241 051605 11.40 52062 someone
0520 051605 10.63 52062
0520 051605 10.66 52062
0520 051605 10.65 52062

Can sed at all be used to identify a certain column, in this case the 5th column? If not, then I will use the awk solution from the source above.
Subsequently sed would have to match for emptiness and delete the line if there is a match, so in the example the output would be the first and second line only.

2

well... sed is not ideal for this, but if you reall want you could do something like:

#  sed -n '/[^ ]* [^ ]* [^ ]* [^ ]* [^ ]/p;' infile
EMID MMDDYY HOURS JOB EMNAME
0241 051605 11.40 52062 someone

awk is a much better tool for this sort of issue...

HTH

3

Thank you for your response. So from what I understand, is that the following regex:

[^ ]*

means: match anything at all that is non-empty followed by one or more characters and ends with a space. Is that correct?

EDIT: in the code section there is a non-visible space appended.

4

close.

match any number of characters that are not spaces, followed by a space..

HTH

5

Thanks again. That helps.