Why cant i delete blank lines?

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

I have a sed pipeline:

myVar=$(cat $FILE | sed -n '/regex/,/regex/{/regex/d;p}' | sed -n '/regex/!p' | sed -e s/[^:]*:// | sed /regex/,+8d \
 )

sed '/^$/d'
sed '/./!d'

And i've tried to add that in a different order rather then just on the end..Why isnt it deleting all the blank lines? Btw, my file really didnt have very much blank lines to begin with..

2

sed '/^ *$/d'

With or w/o spaces it really just doesnt want to.

3

You should not pipe one sed into the next. Put all your sed statements together into one script.

Your blank lines might consist of non-printing characters, maybe spaces and/or tabs.

To find out you could display the file using "od -ax" and have a look at the hex codes of your characters.

If it is only tabs and blanks (aka "whitespace") then use the following expression (replace "<b>" with a blank and "<tab>" with a literal tab char):

sed '/^[<b><tab>]*$/d'

I hope this helps.

bakunin