remove blank lines from a file

saccskiz · #1 (**permalink**) 03-04-04, 12:28

i have a data file (.dat) that has 10000 lines out of which 8 lines are blank. what is the command to remove these blank lines from the file?
Thanks

aigles · #2 (**permalink**) 03-04-04, 13:15

Code:

# Remove empty lines 
sed '/^$/d' input_file

# Remove empty or blank lines (two methods)
sed '/^[[:spaces:]]$/' input_line
awk 'NF>0' input_line

saccskiz · #3 (**permalink**) 03-04-04, 13:22

Thank you very much. It worked.

Can you also guide me how to find out the total number of
blank or empty lines in an input file ? Thanks

aigles · #4 (**permalink**) 03-04-04, 13:28

Code:

awk 'NF>0 {count++} END { print count}' input_line

saccskiz · #5 (**permalink**) 03-04-04, 14:05

you are awesome, thanks

Damian Ibbotson · #6 (**permalink**) 03-05-04, 04:57

Quote:

Originally posted by aigles

Code:

awk 'NF>0 {count++} END { print count}' input_line

The above would count the number of non-blank lines. To count the number of blank lines, subtract from the record count.

Code:

awk 'NF>0 {count++} END { print NR-count}' yourFile

Another way would be to use grep -c.

Code:

grep -c "^[ \t]*$" yourFile

Damian

aigles · #7 (**permalink**) 03-05-04, 05:04

Oops .... Good shooting Damian !

aigles · #8 (**permalink**) 03-05-04, 07:13

I forgot to give the correction :

Code:

awk 'NF==0 {count++} END { print count}' input_line

apoorva_nigam · #9 (**permalink**) 01-22-13, 04:29

Hi ,

I used grep -c "^[ \t]*$" File_Name and getting answer as 0 ...

does that mean there are no lines between records..

Please tell me how to delete spaces between records from dat file .
Neha

apoorva_nigam · #10 (**permalink**) 01-22-13, 05:14

Hi ,

I used grep -c "^[ \t]*$" File_Name and getting answer as 0 ...

does that mean there are no lines between records..

Please tell me how to delete spaces between records from dat file .
Neha

kitaman · #11 (**permalink**) 01-22-13, 10:28

Does the file have newlines in it?
.dat files are generally created by an application program, and may appear to operating system utilities as a single line, that is, the records are fixed length, and do not have record separators.
Use 'hexdump' to determine if there are record separators (a line feed is 0a in hexadecimal.)

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