begin quoting Brad Beyenhof as of Sat, Feb 23, 2008 at 07:07:44AM -0800: > On Sat, Feb 23, 2008 at 12:37 AM, SJS <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Then we sort again, which collects all of the blank lines together. The > > -u option to sort does basically the same thing as uniq -- identical > > lines are collapsed into just one. Since the only lines that are going > > to be identical are the blank lines, this has the effect of getting > > rid of the blank lines. > > That (sort -u) doesn't really get rid of the blank lines; you still > end up with a single blank line in the output.
Yes. It gets rid of the blank lines, and leaves just one. > I prefer to do such a > step with "grep ." to return all lines that contain non-whitespace > characters. Well, . matches spaces and tabs, so to be pedantic, that's not entirely true. :) But there's nothing between ^ and $ to catch the . so it works just fine. Better would be to use a g/re/d with an re of "^$". . . -- Optimal was not the point Quick and good enough was. Stewart Stremler -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-lpsg
