Sed command is very helpful for text processing. It’s just matter of regular expression. Here is how you can truncate empty lines in the file using command sed.
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$ sed '/^\s*$/d' <file_name> |
The above command will give you the output by deleting empty lines. If you want to modify the original file itself. You use the option -i
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$ sed -i '/^\s*$/d' <file_name> |
Example:
I have a file with following data and named as numbers
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$ cat numbers 2989239823 8239823922 3892389239 2938923829 923892389 838888888 000000000 |
Now see, the way to truncate empty lines using sed
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$ sed '/^\s*$/d' numbers 2989239823 8239823922 3892389239 2938923829 923892389 838888888 0000000000 |
The above command won’t change the original file. If you want to change original use option -i
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sed -i '/^\s*$/d' numbers |
Explanation:
Sed interprets ‘/^s*$/d’ and giving us the desired output. Here text between slashes(/regular expression/) represent the regular expression followed by sed command “d” means delete. So command sed matches the lines with given regular expression. If it finds the match it applies the command.