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Prints a file leaving out all blank lines and comment-only lines

Terminal - Prints a file leaving out all blank lines and comment-only lines
egrep -v "^\s*(#|$)" myfile.cfg
2011-12-08 15:25:17
User: dan
Functions: egrep
1
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Prints a file leaving out all blank lines and comment-only lines

Does not print any line that either:

- is empty

- contains only spaces or tabs

- starts with #

- starts with spaces/tabs followed by a #

Add to favourites | Report as malicious

Alternatives

There are 4 alternatives - vote for the best!

Terminal - Alternatives

Know a better way?

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What others think

You got your useless cat award. Congratulations

Comment by zolden 75 weeks and 5 days ago

This, instead of dumping only lines containing only whitespace, will dump lines containing only "s". Probably not real useful, but you never know. :-)

Comment by trapperb 75 weeks and 5 days ago

Might be useful for boring configs with lots of comments, but as pointed above it needs backslash before that s because, currently it does NOT do what description says.

Comment by mwgamera 75 weeks and 2 days ago

For some reason the backslash does not show up. Here's the command:

cat boring.conf | egrep -v "^\s*(#|$)"
Comment by dan 75 weeks and 1 day ago

Or:

egrep -v "^\s*(#|$)" boring.conf

No need for cat(1).

Comment by atoponce 74 weeks and 1 day ago

Thanks @atoponce, much better. I've modified the command.

Comment by dan 73 weeks and 6 days ago

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