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Re: One-liner removes whitespace-only lines from text file

by FoxtrotUniform (Prior)
on Dec 19, 2001 at 02:21 UTC ( [id://132956]=note: print w/replies, xml ) Need Help??


in reply to (code) One-liner removes whitespace-only lines from text file

This snippet removes all non-empty lines containing only whitespace, but I don't think that's particularly intuitive behaviour. If I want to remove all "blank" lines from a file, I probably want:

perl -i.bak -ne 'print if /\S/' file.txt

and if I want to get rid of all the lines with "useless" whitespace, I probably want to collapse them to empty lines:

perl -i.bak -ne 's/^\s+$//;print' file.txt

Update: Changed first one-liner to Ovid's for readability.

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