text - Remove blank lines with grep

Question

I tried grep -v '^$' in Linux and that didn't work. This file came from a Windows file system.

Answer 1

Try the following:

grep -v -e '^$' foo.txt

The -e option allows regex patterns for matching.

The single quotes around ^$ makes it work for Cshell. Other shells will be happy with either single or double quotes.

UPDATE: This works for me for a file with blank lines or "all white space" (such as windows lines with " " style line endings), whereas the above only removes files with blank lines and unix style line endings:

grep -v -e '^[[:space:]]*$' foo.txt