On 2009-09-05 17:36, Gary Kline wrote: > in my manuscript, i have many places where i'ved used several newlines to > indicate a jump in time, or topic, or mood, or <<whatever>>. i have lost these > vertical spacing in all but my original draft. can i use grep somehow to find > these extra newlines? > > if not grep, then sed, ed, or what?!
Sed has the ability to pull into the current line the next line, appended and separated by a "\n" character. It's hard to use correctly, I've found, and my simple demo: sed -e '/^$/{N;N;N; s/^\n\n\n$/===4 blank lines==/; }' Does not quite work as I'd hoped. But hopefully it's enough to get you started. -- Matthew Anthony Kolybabi (Mak) <m...@kolybabi.com> () ASCII Ribbon Campaign | Against HTML e-mail /\ www.asciiribbon.org | Against proprietary extensions _______________________________________________ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org"