Deleting Blank Lines Using Grep
June 20, 2023 —
Gregg Szumowski
If you have a file (or a stream) that has blank lines you want to remove, you can use this command:
$ grep -v "^ *$" file-with-blanks.txt > output-file.txt
where file-with-blanks.txt is the input file and has
blank lines and output-file.txt will be the output file
without the blank lines.
You have to keep the space between the ^
and the *$ otherwise blank lines which include spaces will
not be removed.